A    WRITER'S 
RECOLLECTIONS 


BOOKS  BY 
MRS.  HUMPHRY  WARD 

A  WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

THE  CORYSTON   FAMILY 

ELEANOR 

FENWICK'S  CAREER 

LADY  ROSE'S  DAUGHTER 

THE   MARRIAGE   OF  WILLIAM   ASHE 

THE  TESTING  OF  DIANA   MALLORY 

LIFE  OF  W.  T.  ARNOLD 


HARPER  &   BROTHERS,  NEW   YORK 

[ESTABLISHED  1817] 


[See  page  4 


DR.   THOMAS   ARNOLD    OF   RUGBY 


A  WRITER'S 
RECOLLECTIONS 

BY 

MRS.   HUMPHRY   WARD 

Author  of 

"ELEANOR"   "LADY  ROSE'S  DAUGHTER" 
"THE  TESTING  OF  DIANA  MALLORY"  ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED 


VOLUME    I 


HARPER  &  BROTHERS  PUBLISHERS 
NEW  YORK  AND  LONDON 


PR 


hSS 


A  WRITER'S  RECOLLECTIONS 


Copyright,  1918.  by  Harper  &  Brother* 

Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 

Published  November,  1918 

L-S 


To 
T.  H.  W. 

(In  memory  of  April  6,  1872) 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I.  EARLY  DATS 1 

II.  Fox  How 31 

III.  THE  FAMILY  OF  Fox  How 45 

IV.  OTHER  CHILDREN  OP  Fox  How 78 

V.  THE  FRIENDS  OP  Fox  How 101 

VI.  YOUNG  DAYS  AT  OXFORD 129 

VII.  BALLIOL  AND  LINCOLN 168 

VIII.  EARLY  MARRIED  LIFE 188 

IX.  THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  "ROBERT  ELSMERE"  .         .  216 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


DR.  THOMAS  ARNOLD  OP  RUGBY  ...... 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD  .     .  ) 

I   .........  Facing  p.     14 

JOHN  HENRY  NEWMAN  J 

Fox  How,   THE   WESTMORLAND   HOME   OP  THE 

ARNOLDS  .............  80 

BENJAMIN  JOWETT  .  ........      "       168 


A   WRITER'S 
RECOLLECTIONS 


A  WRITER'S 
RECOLLECTIONS 

CHAPTER  I 

EARLY   DAYS 

we  all  become  garrulous  and  confi- 
dential  as  we  approach  the  gates  of 
old  age?  Is  it  that  we  instinctively  feel, 
and  cannot  help  asserting,  our  one  advan- 
tage over  the  younger  generation,  which 
has  so  many  over  us? — the  one  advantage 
of  time! 

After  all,  it  is  not  disputable  that  we 
have  lived  longer  than  they.  When  they 
talk  of  past  poets,  or  politicians,  or  novelists, 
whom  the  young  still  deign  to  remember,  of 
whom  for  once  their  estimate  agrees  with 
ours,  we  can  sometimes  put  in  a  quiet, 
"I  saw  him"— or,  "I  talked  with  him" 
which  for  the  moment  wins  the  conversa- 
tional race.  And  as  we  elders  fall  back 
before  the  brilliance  and  glitter  of  the  New 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

Age,  advancing  "like  an  army  with  ban- 
ners," this  mere  prerogative  of  years  becomes 
in  itself  a  precious  possession.  After  all, 
we  cannot  divest  ourselves  of  it,  if  we  would. 
It  is  better  to  make  friends  with  it— to  turn 
it  into  a  kind  of  panache — to  wear  it  with  an 
air,  since  wear  it  we  must. 

So  as  the  years  draw  on  toward  the  Biblical 
limit,  the  inclination  to  look  back,  and  to 
tell  some  sort  of  story  of  what  one  has  seen, 
grows  upon  most  of  us.    I  cannot  hope  that 
what  I  have  to  say  will  be  very  interesting 
to  many.    A  life  spent  largely  among  books, 
and  in  the  exercise  of  a  literary  profession, 
has  very  obvious  drawbacks,  as  a  subject- 
matter,  when  one  comes  to  write  about  it. 
I  can  only  attempt  it  with  any  success,  if 
my  readers  will  allow  me  a  large  psycho- 
logical element.    The  thoughts  and  opinions 
of  one  human  being,   if  they  are  sincere, 
must  always  have  an  interest  for  some  other 
human  beings.    The  world  is  there  to  think 
about;   and  if  we  have  lived,  or  are  living, 
with   any   sort   of   energy,    we   must   have 
thought  about  it,  and  about  ourselves  in  re- 
lation to  it — thought  " furiously"  often.  And 
it  is  out  of  the  many  "thinkings"  of  many 
folk,   strong  or  weak,   dull  or  far-ranging, 
that   thought   itself   grows.      For   progress 
surely,  whether  in  men  or  nations,  means 


EARLY    DAYS 

only  a  richer  knowledge;  the  more  impres- 
sions, therefore,  on  the  human  intelligence 
that  we  can  seize  and  record,  the  more  sen- 
sitive becomes  that  intelligence  itself. 

But  of  course  the  difficulty  lies  in  the 
seizing  and  recording — in  the  choice,  that  is, 
of  what  to  say,  and  how  to  say  it.    In  this 
choice,  as  I  look  back  over  more  than  half  a 
century,  I  can  only  follow — and  trust — the 
same  sort  of  instinct  that  one  follows  in  the 
art  of  fiction.     I  shall  be  telling  what  is 
primarily  true,  or  as  true  as  I  can  make  it, 
as    distinguished    from    what    is    primarily 
imagination,  built  on  truth.    But  the  truth 
one   uses   in   fiction    must   be   interesting! 
Milton  expresses  that  in  the  words  "sen- 
suous" and  "passionate,"  which  he  applies 
to  poetry  in  the  Areopagitica.   And  the  same 
thing  applies  to  autobiography,  where  selec- 
tion is  even  more  necessary  than  in  fiction. 
Nothing  ought  to  be  told,  I  think,  that  does 
not  interest  or  kindle  one's  own  mind  in 
looking  back;    it  is  the  only  condition  on 
which  one  can  hope  to  interest  or  kindle 
other   minds.      And   this   means   that  one 
ought  to  handle  things  broadly,  taking  only 
the  salient  points  in  the  landscape  of  the 
past,  and  of  course  with  as  much  detach- 
ment as  possible.    Though  probably  in  the 
end  one  will  have  to  admit — egotists  that 

L-2  3 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

we  all  are! — that  not  much  detachment  is 
possible. 

For  me,  the  first  point  that  stands  out  is 
the  arrival  of  a  little  girl  of  five,  in  the  year 
1856,  at  a  gray-stone  house  in  a  Westmor- 
land valley,  where,  fourteen  years  earlier, 
the  children  of  Arnold  of  Rugby,  the 
" Doctor"  of  Tom  Brown's  Schooldays,  had 
waited  on  a  June  day,  to  greet  their  father, 
expected  from  the  South,  only  to  hear, 
as  the  summer  day  died  away,  that  two 
hours'  sharp  illness,  that  very  morning,  had 
taken  him  from  them.  Of  what  preceded 
my  arrival  as  a  black-haired,  dark-eyed  child, 
with  my  father,  mother,  and  two  brothers, 
at  Fox  How,  the  holiday  house  among  the 
mountains  which  the  famous  headmaster  had 
built  for  himself  in  1834,  I  have  but  little 
recollection.  I  see  dimly  another  house  in 
wide  fields,  where  dwarf  lilies  grew,  and  I 
know  that  it  was  a  house  in  Tasmania,  where 
at  the  time  of  my  birth  my  father,  Thomas 
Arnold,  the  Doctor's  second  son,  was  or- 
ganizing education  in  the  young  colony.  I 
can  just  recall,  too,  the  deck  of  a  ship 
which  to  my  childish  feet  seemed  vast — but 
the  William  Brown  was  a  sailing-ship  of 
only  400  tons! — in  which  we  made  the  voy- 
age home  in  1856.  Three  months  and  a 
half  we  took  about  it,  going  round  the  Horn 

4 


EARLY    DAYS 

in  bitter  weather,  much  run  over  by  rats 
at  night,  and  expected  to  take  our  baths 
by  day  in  two  huge  barrels  full  of  sea  water 
on  the  deck,  into  which  we  children  were 
plunged  shivering  by  our  nurse,  two  or  three 
times  a  week.  My  father  and  mother,  their 
three  children,  and  some  small  cousins,  who 
were  going  to  England  under  my  mother's 
care,  were  the  only  passengers. 

I  can  remember,  too,  being  lifted — weak 
and  miserable  with  toothache  —  in  my  fa- 
ther's arms  to  catch  the  first  sight  of  English 
shores  as  we  neared  the  mouth  of  the 
Thames;  and  then  the  dismal  inn  by  the 
docks  where  we  first  took  shelter.  The 
dreary  room  where  we  children  slept  the 
first  night,  its  dingy  ugliness  and  its  barred 
windows,  still  come  back  to  me  as  a  vision 
of  horror.  Next  day,  like  angels  of  rescue, 
came  an  aunt  and  uncle,  who  took  us  away 
to  other  and  cheerful  quarters,  and  pres- 
ently saw  us  off  to  Westmorland.  The  aunt 
was  my  godmother,  Doctor  Arnold's  eldest 
daughter — then  the  young  wife  of  William 
Edward  Forster,  a  Quaker  manufacturer,  who 
afterward  became  the  well-known  Education 
Minister  of  1870,  and  was  Chief  Secretary  for 
Ireland  in  the  terrible  years  1880-82. 

To  my  mother  and  her  children,  Fox  How 
and  its  inmates  represented  much  that  was 

5 


A   WRITER'S  RECOLLECTIONS 

new  and  strange.  My  mother  was  the  grand- 
daughter of  one  of  the  first  Governors  of 
Tasmania,  Governor  Sorell,  and  had  been 
brought  up  in  the  colony,  except  for  a  brief 
schooling  at  Brussels.  Of  her  personal  beauty 
in  youth  we  children  heard  much,  as  we 
grew  up,  from  her  old  Tasmanian  friends 
•and  kinsfolk  who  would  occasionally  drift 
across  us;  and  I  see  as  though  I  had  been 
there  a  scene  often  described  to  me — my 
mother  playing  Hermione  in  the  "  Winter's 
Tale/'  at  Government  House  when  Sir  Will- 
iam Denison  was  Governor — a  vision,  lovely 
and  motionless,  on  her  pedestal,  till  at  the 
words,  "Music!  awake  her!  Strike!"  she 
kindled  into  life.  Her  family  were  probably 
French  in  origin.  Governor  Sorell  had  been 
a  man  of  promise  in  his  youth.  His  father, 
General  William  Alexander  Sorell,  of  the 
Coldstream  Guards,  was  a  soldier  of  some 
eminence,  whose  two  sons,  William  and 
Thomas,  both  served  under  Sir  John  Moore 
and  at  the  Cape.  But  my  great-grandfather 
ruined  his  military  career,  while  he  was 
Deputy  Adjutant-General  at  the  Cape,  by  a 
love-affair  with  a  brother  officer's  wife,  and 
was  banished  or  promoted — whichever  one 
pleases  to  call  it — to  the  new  colony  of  Tas- 
mania, of  which  he  became  Governor  in 

1816.    His  eldest  son,  by  the  wife  he  had  left 

6 


EARLY    DAYS 

behind  him  in  England,  went  out  as  a  youth 
of  twenty-one  or  so,  to  join  his  father,  the 
Governor,  in  Tasmania,  and  I  possess  a  little 
calf-bound  diary  of  my  grandfather  written 
in  a  very  delicate  and  refined  hand,  about 
the  year  1823.  The  faint  entries  in  it  show 
him  to  have  been  a  devoted  son.  But  when, 
in  1830  or  so,  the  Governor  left  the  colony, 
and  retired  to  Brussels,  my  grandfather  re- 
mained in  Van  Diemen's  Land,  as  it  was 
then  generally  called,  became  very  much 
attached  to  the  colony,  and  filled  the  post 
of  Registrar  of  Deeds  for  many  years  under 
its  successive  Governors.  I  just  remember 
him,  as  a  gentle,  affectionate,  upright  be- 
ing, a  gentleman  of  an  old,  punctilious 
school,  strictly  honorable  and  exact,  con- 
tent with  a  small  sphere,  and  much  loved 
within  it.  He  would  sometimes  talk  to  his 
children  of  early  days  in  Bath,  of  his  father's 
young  successes  and  promotions,  and  of  his 
grandfather,  General  Sorell,  who,  as  Adju- 
tant of  the  Coldstream  Guards  from  1744 
to  1758,  and  associated  with  all  the  home 
and  foreign  service  of  that  famous  regiment 
during  those  years,  through  the  Seven 
Years'  War,  and  up  to  the  opening  of  the 
American  War  of  Independence,  played  a 
vaguely  brilliant  part  in  his  grandson's  recol- 
lections. But  he  himself  was  quite  content 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

with  the  modest  affairs  of  an  infant  colony, 
which  even  in  its  earliest  days  achieved, 
whether  in  its  landscape  or  its  life,  a  curi- 
ously English  effect;  as  though  an  English 
midland  county  had  somehow  got  loose  and, 
drifting  to  the  Southern  seas,  had  there  set 
up — barring  a  few  black  aborigines,  a  few 
convicts,  its  mimosas,  and  its  tree-ferns— 
another  quiet  version  of  the  quiet  English 
life  it  had  left  behind. 

But  the  Sorells,  all  the  same,  had  some 
foreign  and  excitable  blood  in  them.  Their 
story  of  themselves  was  that  they  were 
French  Huguenots,  expelled  in  1685,  who 
had  settled  in  England  and,  coming  of  a 
military  stock,  had  naturally  sought  careers 
in  the  English  army.  There  are  points  in 
this  story  which  are  puzzling;  but  the  foreign 
touch  in  my  mother,  and  in  the  Governor — 
to  judge  from  the  only  picture  of  him  which 
remains — was  unmistakable.  Delicate  feat- 
ures, small,  beautifully  shaped  hands  and 
feet,  were  accompanied  in  my  mother  by  a 
French  vivacity  and  quickness,  an  overflow- 
ing energy,  which  never  forsook  her  through 
all  her  trials  and  misfortunes.  In  the  Gov- 
ernor, the  same  physical  characteristics  make 
a  rather  decadent  and  foppish  impression — 
as  of  an  old  stock  run  to  seed.  The  stock 
had  been  reinvigorated  in  my  mother,  and 

8 


EARLY    DAYS 

one  of  its  original  elements  which  certainly 
survived  in  her  temperament  and  tradition 
was  of  great  importance  both  for  her  own 
life  and  for  her  children's.  This  was  the 
Protestant  —  the  French  Protestant  —  ele- 
ment; which  no  doubt  represented  in  the 
family  from  which  she  came  a  history  of 
long  suffering  at  the  hands  of  Catholicism. 
Looking  back  upon  her  Protestantism,  I  see 
that  it  was  not  the  least  like  English  Evan- 
gelicalism, whether  of  the  Anglican  or  dis- 
senting type.  There  was  nothing  emotional 
or  " enthusiastic"  in  it — no  breath  of  Wesley 
or  Wilberforce;  but  rather  something  drawn 
from  deep  wells  of  history,  instinctive  and 
invincible.  Had  some  direct  Calvinist  an- 
cestor of  hers,  with  a  soul  on  fire,  fought 
the  tyranny  of  Bossuet  and  Madame  de 
Maintenon,  before — eternally  hating  and  re- 
senting "Papistry'' — he  abandoned  his  coun- 
try and  kinsfolk,  in  the  search  for  religious 
liberty?  That  is  the  impression  which — 
looking  back  upon  her  life — it  often  makes 
upon  me.  All  the  more  strange  that  to  her 
it  fell,  unwittingly,  imagining,  indeed,  that 
by  her  marriage  with  a  son  of  Arnold  of 
Rugby  she  was  taking  a  step  precisely  in 
the  opposite  direction,  to  be,  by  a  kind  of 
tragic  surprise,  which  yet  was  no  one's 
fault,  the  wife  of  a  Catholic. 

9 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

And  that  brings  me  to  my  father,  whose 
character  and  story  were  so  important  to 
all  his  children  that  I  must  try  and  draw 
them,  though  I  cannot  pretend  to  any  im- 
partiality in  doing  so — only  to  the  insight 
that  affection  gives;  its  one  abiding  advan- 
tage over  the  critic  and  the  stranger. 

He  was  the  second  son  of  Doctor  Arnold 
of  Rugby,  and  the  younger  brother — by  only 
eleven  months — of  Matthew  Arnold.  On 
that  morning  of  June  12,  1842,  when  the 
headmaster  who  in  fourteen  years'  rule  at 
Rugby  had  made  himself  so  conspicuous  a 
place,  not  merely  in  the  public-school  world, 
but  in  English  life  generally,1  arose,  in  the 
words  of  his  poet  son — to  tread — 

In  the  summer  morning,  the  road — 
Of  death,  at  a  call  unforeseen — 
Sudden — 

my  father,  a  boy  of  eighteen,   was  in  the 
house,   and  witnessed  the  fatal   attack  of 

*At  the  moment  of  correcting  these  proofs,  my  attention 
has  been  called  to  a  foolish  essay  on  my  grandfather  by  Mr. 
Lytton  Strachey,  none  the  less  foolish  because  it  is  the  work 
of  an  extremely  clever  man.  If  Mr.  Strachey  imagines  that 
the  effect  of  my  grandfather's  life  and  character  upon  men 
like  Stanley  and  Clough,  or  a  score  of  others  who  could  be 
named,  can  be  accounted  for  by  the  eidolon  he  presents  to  his 
readers  in  place  of  the  real  human  being,  one  can  only  regard 
it  as  one  proof  the  more  of  the  ease  with  which  a  certain  kind 
of  ability  outwits  itself. 


EARLY    DAYS 

angina  pectoris  which,  in  two  hours,  cut 
short  a  memorable  career,  and  left  those  who 
till  then,  under  a  great  man's  shelter  and 
keeping,  had — 

Rested  as  under  the  boughs 
Of  a  mighty  oak.  .  .  . 
Bare,  unshaded,  alone. 

He  had  been  his  father's  special  favorite 
among  the  elder  children,  as  shown  by  some 
verses  in  my  keeping  addressed  to  him  as  a 
small  boy,  at  different  times,  by  "the  Doc- 
tor." Those  who  know  their  Tom  Brown's 
Schooldays  will  perhaps  remember  the  various 
passages  in  the  book  where  the  softer  quali- 
ties of  the  man  whom  "three  hundred  reck- 
less childish  boys"  feared  with  all  their 
hearts,  "and  very  little  besides  in  heaven  or 
earth,"  are  made  plain  in  the  language  of 
that  date.  Arthur's  illness,  for  instance^ 
when  the  little  fellow,  who  has  been  at 
death's  door,  tells  Tom  Brown,  who  is  at  last 
allowed  to  see  him:  "You  can't  think  what 
the  Doctor's  like  when  one's  ill.  He  said 
such  brave  and  tender  and  gentle  things  to 
me — I  felt  quite  light  and  strong  after  it, 
and  never  had  any  more  fear."  Or  East's 
talk  with  the  Doctor,  when  the  lively  boy 
of  many  scrapes  has  a  moral  return  upon 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

himself,  and  says  to  his  best  friend:  "You 
can't  think  how  kind  and  gentle  he  was,  the 
great  grim  man,  whom  I've  feared  more  than 
anybody  on  earth.  When  I  stuck,  he  lifted 
me,  just  as  if  I'd  been  a  little  child.  And 
he  seemed  to  know  all  I'd  felt,  and  to  have 
gone  through  it  all."  This  tenderness  and 
charm  of  a  strong  man,  which  in  Stanley's 
biography  is  specially  mentioned  as  growing 
more  and  more  visible  in  the  last  months  of 
his  life,  was  always  there  for  his  children. 
In  a  letter  written  in  1828  to  his  sister,  when 
my  father  as  a  small  child  not  yet  five  was 
supposed  to  be  dying,  Arnold  says,  trying 
to  steel  himself  against  the  bitterness  of 
coming  loss,  "I  might  have  loved  him,  had 
he  lived,  too  dearly — you  know  how  deeply 
I  do  love  him  now."  And  three  years  later, 
when  " little  Tom,"  on  his  eighth  birthday, 
had  just  said,  wistfully — with  a  curious  fore- 
boding instinct,  "I  think  that  the  eight 
years  I  have  now  lived  will  be  the  happiest 
of  my  life,"  Arnold,  painfully  struck  by 
the  words,  wrote  some  verses  upon  them 
which  I  still  possess.  "The  Doctor"  was  no 
poet,  though  the  best  of  his  historical  prose 
—the  well-known  passage  in  the  Roman 
History,  for  instance,  on  the  death  of  Mar- 
cellus — has  some  of  the  essential  notes  of 

poetry — passion,  strength,  music.     But  the 

12 


EARLY    DAYS 

gentle  Wordsworthian  quality  of  his  few 
essays  in  verse  will  be  perhaps  interesting 
to  those  who  are  aware  of  him  chiefly  as 
the  great  Liberal  fighter  of  eighty  years  ago. 
He  replies  to  his  little  son: 

Is  it  that  aught  prophetic  stirred 
Thy  spirit  to  that  ominous  word, 

Foredating  in  thy  childish  mind 
The  fortune  of  thy  Life's  career- 
That  naught  of  brighter  bliss  shall  cheer 

What  still  remains  behind? 

Or  is  thy  Life  so  full  of  bliss 

That,  come  what  may,  more  blessed  than  this 

Thou  canst  not  be  again? 
And  fear'st  thou,  standing  on  the  shore, 
What  storms  disturb  with  wild  uproar 

The  years  of  older  men? 

At  once  to  enjoy,  at  once  to  hope — 
That  fills  indeed  the  largest  scope 

Of  good  our  thoughts  can  reach. 
Where  can  we  learn  so  blest  a  rule, 
What  wisest  sage,  what  happiest  school, 

Art  so  divine  can  teach? 

The  answer,  of  course,  in  the  mouth  of 
a  Christian  teacher  is  that  in  Christianity 
alone  is  there  both  present  joy  and  future 
hope.  The  passages  in  Arnold's  most  inti- 
mate diary,  discovered  after  his  death,  and 

13 


published  by  Dean  Stanley,  show  what  the 
Christian  faith  was  to  my  grandfather,  how 
closely  bound  up  with  every  action  and 
feeling  of  his  life.  The  impression  made 
by  his  conception  of  that  faith,  as  interpreted 
by  his  own  daily  life,  upon  a  great  school,  and, 
through  the  many  strong  and  able  men  who 
went  out  from  it,  upon  English  thought  and 
feeling,  is  a  part  of  English  religious  history. 
But  curiously  enough  the  impression  upon 
his  own  sons  appeared,  at  any  rate,  to  be 
less  strong  and  lasting  than  in  the  case  of 
others.  I  mean,  of  course,  in  the  matter 
of  opinion.  The  famous  father  died,  and 
his  children  had  to  face  the  world  without 
his  guiding  hand.  Matthew  and  Tom,  Will- 
iam and  Edward,  the  eldest  four  sons,  went 
in  due  time  to  Oxford,  and  the  youngest  boy 
into  the  Navy.  My  grandmother  made  her 
home  at  Fox  How  under  the  shelter  of  the 
fells,  with  her  four  daughters,  the  youngest 
of  whom  was  only  eight  when  their  father 
died.  The  devotion  of  all  the  nine  children 
to  their  mother,  to  one  another,  and  to  the 
common  home  was  never  weakened  for  a 
moment  by  the  varieties  of  opinion  that  life 
was  sure  to  bring  out  in  the  strong  brood 
of  strong  parents.  But  the  development  of 
the  elder  two  sons  at  the  University  was 
probably  very  different  from  what  it  would 

14 


£  - 

*  c 

5  a 


a    X 
I     | 

§5 

o 
—  2! 

K   B 

«! 
^.1 


EARLY   DAYS 

have  been  had  their  father  lived.  Neither 
of  them,  indeed,  ever  showed,  while  there, 
the  smallest  tendency  to  the  "Newmanism" 
which  Arnold  of  Rugby  had  fought  with  all 
his  powers;  which  he  had  denounced  with 
such  vehemence  in  the  Edinburgh  article  on 
"The  Oxford  Malignants."  My  father  was 
at  Oxford  all  through  the  agitated  years 
which  preceded  Newman's  secession  from  the 
Anglican  communion.  He  had  rooms  in 
University  College  in  the  High  Street,  nearly 
opposite  St.  Mary's,  in  which  John  Henry 
Newman,  then  its  Vicar,  delivered  Sunday 
after  Sunday  those  sermons  which  will  never 
be  forgotten  by  the  Anglican  Church.  But 
my  father  only  once  crossed  the  street  to 
hear  him,  and  was  then  repelled  by  the  man- 
nerism of  the  preacher.  Matthew  Arnold 
occasionally  went,  out  of  admiration,  my 
father  used  to  say,  for  that  strange  New- 
manic  power  of  words,  which  in  itself  fasci- 
nated the  young  Balliol  poet,  who  was  to 
produce  his  first  volume  of  poems  two  years 
after  Newman's  secession  to  the  Church  of 
Rome.  But  he  was  never  touched  in  the 
smallest  degree  by  Newman's  opinions.  He 
and  my  father  and  Arthur  Clough,  and  'a 
few  other  kindred  spirits,  lived  indeed  in 
quite  another  world  of  thought.  They  dis- 
covered George  Sand,  Emerson,  and  Car- 

15 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

lyle,  and  orthodox  Christianity  no  longer 
seemed  to  them  the  sure  refuge  that  it  had 
always  been  to  the  strong  teacher  who 
trained  them  as  boys.  There  are  many  al- 
lusions of  many  dates  in  the  letters  of  my 
father  and  uncle  to  each  other,  as  to  their 
common  Oxford  passion  for  George  Sand. 
Consuelo,  in  particular,  was  a  revelation  to 
the  two  young  men  brought  up  under  the 
"earnest"  influence  of  Rugby.  It  seemed  to 
open  to  them  a  world  of  artistic  beauty  and 
joy  of  which  they  had  never  dreamed;  and 
to  loosen  the  bands  of  an  austere  conception 
of  life,  which  began  to  appear  to  them  too 
narrow  for  the  facts  of  life.  Wilhelm  Meister, 
read  in  Carlyle's  translation  at  the  same  time, 
exercised  a  similar  liberating  and  enchanting 
power  upon  my  father.  The  social  enthusi- 
asms of  George  Sand  also  affected  him 
greatly,  strengthening  whatever  he  had  in- 
herited of  his  father's  generous  discontent 
with  an  iron  world,  where  the  poor  suffer  too 
much  and  work  too  hard.  And  this  discontent, 
when  the  time  came  for  him  to  leave  Oxford, 
assumed  a  form  which  startled  his  friends. 

He  had  done  very  well  at  Oxford,  taking 
his  two  Firsts  with  ease,  and  was  offered  a 
post  in  the  Colonial  Office  immediately  on 
leaving  the  University.  But  the  time  was 
full  of  schemes  for  a  new  heaven  and  a 

16 


EARLY    DAYS 

new  earth,  wherein  should  dwell  equality  and 
righteousness.  The  storm  of  1848  was  pre- 
paring in  Europe;  the  Corn  Laws  had  fallen; 
the  Chartists  were  gathering  in  England. 
To  settle  down  to  the  old  humdrum  round  of 
Civil  Service  promotion  seemed  to  my  father 
impossible.  This  revolt  of  his,  and  its  effect 
upon  his  friends,  of  whom  the  most  intimate 
was  Arthur  Clough,  has  left  its  mark  on 
Clough's  poem,  the  "Vacation  Pastoral," 
which  he  called  "The  Bothie  of  Tober-na- 
Vuolich,"  or,  as  it  runs  in  my  father's  old 
battered  copy  which  lies  before  me,  "Tober- 
na-Fuosich."  The  Philip  of  the  poem,  the 
dreamer  and  democrat,  who  says  to  Adam 
the  Tutor- 
Alas,  the  noted  phrase  of  the  prayer-book 
Doing  our  duty  in  that  state  of  life  to  which  God 

has  called  us, 
Seems  to  me  always  to  mean,  when  the  little  rich 

boys  say  it, 
Standing  in  velvet  frock  by  Mania's  brocaded 

flounces, 
Eying  her  gold-fastened  book,  and  the  chain  and 

watch  at  her  bosom, 
Seems  to  me  always  to  mean,  Eat,  drink,  and 

never  mind  others — 

was  in  broad  outline  drawn  from  my  father, 
and  the  impression  made  by  his  idealist, 

17 


A   WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

enthusiastic  youth  upon  his  comrades.  And 
Philip's  migration  to  the  Antipodes  at  the 
end — when  he 

rounded  the  sphere  to  New  Zealand, 
There  he  hewed  and  dug;  subdued  the  earth  and 
his  spirit — 

was  certainly  suggested  by  my  father's 
similar  step  in  1847,  the  year  before  the 
poem  appeared.  Only  in  my  father's  life 
there  had  been  as  yet  no  parallel  to  the 
charming  love-story  of  "The  Bothie."  His 
love-story  awaited  him  on  the  other  side  of 
the  world. 

At  that  moment,  New  Zealand,  the  land 
of  beautiful  mountain  and  sea,  with  its  even 
temperate  climate,  and  its  natives  whom 
English  enthusiasm  hoped  not  only  to 
govern,  but  to  civilize  and  assimilate,  was 
in  the  minds  of  all  to  whom  the  colonies 
seemed  to  offer  chances  of  social  recon- 
struction beyond  any  that  were  possible 
in  a  crowded  and  decadent  Europe. 
"Land  of  Hope,"  I  find  it  often  called  in 
these  old  letters.  "The  gleam"  was  on 
it,  and  my  father,  like  Browning's  War- 
ing, heard  the  call. 

After  it;  follow  it.    Follow  the  gleam! 

18 


EARLY    DAYS 

He  writes  to  his  mother  in  August,  1847, 
from  the  Colonial  Office: 

Every  one  whom  I  meet  pities  me  for  having 
to  return  to  London  at  this  dull  season,  but  to 
my  own  feelings,  it  is  not  worse  than  at  other 
times.  The  things  which  would  make  me  loathe 
the  thought  of  passing  my  life  or  even  several 
years  in  London,  do  not  depend  on  summer  or 
winter.  It  is  the  chronic,  not  the  acute  ills  of 
London  life  which  are  real  ills  to  me.  I  meant 
to  have  talked  to  you  again  before  I  left  home 
about  New  Zealand,  but  I  could  not  find  a  good 
opportunity.  I  do  not  think  you  will  be  sur- 
prised to  hear  that  I  cannot  give  up  my  inten- 
tion— though  you  may  think  me  wrong,  you  will 
believe  that  no  cold  -  heartedness  towards  home 
has  assisted  me  in  framing  my  resolution. 
Where  or  how  we  shall  meet  on  this  side  the 
grave  will  be  arranged  for  us  by  a  wiser  will 
than  our  own.  To  me,  however  strange  and 
paradoxical  it  may  sound,  this  going  to  New 
Zealand  is  become  a  work  of  faith,  and  I  cannot 
but  go  through  with  it. 

And  later  on  when  his  plans  are  settled, 
he  writes  in  exultation  to  his  eldest  sister: 

The  weather  is  gusty  and  rainy,  but  no  cheer- 
lessness  without  can  repress  a  sort  of  exuberant 
buoyancy  of  spirit  which  is  supplied  to  me  from 
within.  There  is  such  an  indescribable  blessed- 

I.-3  19 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

ness  in  looking  forward  to  a  manner  of  life  which 
the  heart  and  conscience  approve,  and  which  at 
the  same  time  satisfies  the  instinct  for  the  heroic 
and  beautiful.  Yet  there  seems  little  enough  in 
a  homely  life  in  a  New  Zealand  forest;  and  in- 
deed there  is  nothing  in  the  thing  itself,  except 
hi  so  far  as  it  flows  from  a  principle,  a  faith. 

And  he  goes  on  to  speak  in  vague  exalted 
words  of  the  "equality"  and  "brotherhood" 
to  which  he  looks  forward  in  the  new  land; 
winding  up  with  an  account  of  his  life  in 
London,  its  daily  work  at  the  Colonial  Office, 
his  walks,  the  occasional  evenings  at  the 
opera  where  he  worships  Jenny  Lind,  his 
readings  and  practisings  in  his  lodgings.  My 
poor  father!  He  little  knew  what  he  was 
giving  up,  or  the  real  conditions  of  the  life 
to  which  he  was  going. 

For,  though  the  Philip  of  "The  Bothie" 
may  have  "hewed  and  dug"  to  good  purpose 
in  New  Zealand,  success  in  colonial  farming 
was  a  wild  and  fleeting  dream  in  my  father's 
case.  He  was  born  for  academic  life  and  a 
scholar's  pursuits.  He  had  no  practical 
gifts,  and  knew  nothing  whatever  of  land 
or  farming.  He  had  only  courage,  youth, 
sincerity,  and  a  charming  presence  which 
made  him  friends  at  sight.  His  mother, 
indeed,  with  her  gentle  wisdom,  put  no  ob- 
stacles in  his  way.  On  the  contrary,  she  re- 

20 


EARLY    DAYS 

membered  that  her  husband  had  felt  a  keen 
imaginative  interest  in  the  colonies,  and  had 
bought  small  sections  of  land  near  Welling- 
ton, which  his  second  son  now  proposed  to 
take  up  and  farm.  But  some  of  the  old 
friends  of  the  family  felt  and  expressed  con- 
sternation. In  particular,  Baron  Bunsen, 
then  Prussian  Ambassador  to  England,  Ar- 
nold of  Rugby's  dear  and  faithful  friend, 
wrote  a  letter  of  earnest  and  affectionate  re- 
monstrance to  the  would-be  colonist.  Let 
me  quote  it,  if  only  that  it  may  remind  me 
of  days  long  ago,  when  it  was  still  possible 
for  a  strong  and  tender  friendship  to  exist 
between  a  Prussian  and  an  Englishman! 

Bunsen  points  out  to  "young  Tom"  that 
he  has  only  been  eight  or  nine  months  in 
the  Colonial  Office,  not  long  enough  to  give 
it  a  fair  trial;  that  the  drudgery  of  his  clerk- 
ship will  soon  lead  to  more  interesting  things; 
that  his  superiors  speak  well  of  him;  above 
all,  that  he  has  no  money  and  no  practical 
experience  of  farming,  and  that  if  he  is 
going  to  New  Zealand  in  the  hope  of  building 
up  a  purer  society,  he  will  soon  find  him- 
self bitterly  disillusioned. 

Pray,  my  dear  young  friend,  do  not  reject 
the  voice  of  a  man  of  nearly  sixty  years,  who  has 
made  his  way  through  life  under  much  greater 

difficulties  perhaps  than  you  imagine — who  was 

21 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

your  father's  dear  friend — who  feels  deeply  at- 
tached to  all  that  bears  the  honored  and  blessed 
name  of  Arnold — who  in  particular  had  your 
father1  s  promise  that  he  would  allow  me  to  offer 
to  you,  after  I  had  seen  you  in  1839,  some- 
thing, of  that  care  and  friendship  he  had  bestowed 
upon  Henry  [Bunsen's  own  son}— do  not  reject 
the  warning  voice  of  that  man,  if  he  entreats 
you  solemnly  not  to  take  a  precipitate  step.  Give 
yourself  tune.  Try  a  change  of  scene.  Go  for  a 
month  or  two  to  France  or  Germany.  I  am  sure 
you  wish  to  satisfy  your  friends  that  you  are 
acting  wisely,  considerately,  in  giving  up  what 
you  have. 

Spartam  quam  nactus  es,  orna — was  Niebuhr's 
word  to  me  when  once,  about  1825,  wearied 
with  diplomatic  life,  I  resolved  to  throw  up  my 
place  and  go — not  to  New  Zealand,  but  to  a 
German  University.  Let  me  say  that  concluding 
word  to  you  and  believe  me,  my  dear  young 
friend, 

Your  sincere  and  affectionate  friend 

BUNSEN. 

P.S. — If  you  feel  disposed  to  have  half  an 
hour's  quiet  conversation  with  me  alone,  pray 
come  to-day  at  six  o'clock,  and  then  dine  with 
us  quietly  at  half-past  six.  I  go  to-morrow  to 
Windsor  Castle  for  four  days. 

Nothing  could  have  been  kinder,  nothing 

more  truly  felt  and  meant.    But  the  young 

22 


EARLY    DAYS 

make  their  own  experience,  and  my  father, 
with  the  smiling  open  look  which  disarmed 
opposition,  and  disguised  all  the  time  a  cer- 
tain stubborn  independence  of  will,  char- 
acteristic of  him  through  life,  took  his  own 
way.  He  went  to  New  Zealand,  and,  now 
that  it  was  done,  the  interest  and  sympathy 
of  all  his  family  and  friends  followed  him. 
Let  me  give  here  the  touching  letter  which 
Arthur  Stanley,  his  father's  biographer, 
wrote  to  him  the  night  before  he  left  Eng- 
land. 

UNIV.  COLL.,  OXFORD,  Nov.  4,  1847. 
Farewell! — (if  you  will  let  me  once  again  recur 
to  a  relation  so  long  since  past  away)  farewell — 
my  dearest,  earliest,  best  of  pupils.  I  cannot 
let  you  go  without  asking  you  to  forgive  those 
many  annoyances  which  I  fear  I  must  have  un- 
consciously inflicted  upon  you  in  the  last  year 
of  your  Oxford  life — nor  without  expressing  the 
interest  which  I  feel,  and  shall  I  trust  ever  feel, 
beyond  all  that  I  can  say,  in  your  future  course. 
You  know — or  perhaps  you  hardly  can  know — 
how  when  I  came  back  to  Oxford  after  the  sum- 
mer of  1842,  your  presence  here  was  to  me  the 
stay  and  charm  of  my  life — how  the  walks — 
the  lectures — the  Sunday  evenings  with  you, 
filled  up  the  void  which  had  been  left  in  my  in- 
terests,1 and  endeared  to  me  all  the  beginnings  of 
my  College  labors.  That  particular  feeling,  as 

1  By  the  sudden  death  of  Doctor  Arnold. 
23 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

is  natural,  has  passed  away — but  it  may  still  be 
a  pleasure  to  you  to  feel  in  your  distant  home 
that  whatever  may  be  my  occupations,  nothing 
will  more  cheer  -and  support  me  through  them 
than  the  belief  that  in  that  new  world  your 
dear  father's  name  is  in  you  still  loved  and 
honored,  and  bringing  forth  the  fruits  which  he 
would  have  delighted  to  see. 

Farewell,  my  dear  friend.  May  God  in  whom 
you  trust  be  with  you. 

Do  not  trouble  yourself  to  answer  this — only 
take  it  as  the  true  expression  of  one  who  often 
thinks  how  little  he  has  done  for  you  in  compari- 
son with  what  he  would. 

Ever  yours, 

A.  P.  STANLEY. 

But,  of  course,  the  inevitable  happened. 
After  a  few  valiant  but  quite  futile  attempts 
to  clear  his  land  with  his  own  hands,  or  with 
the  random  labor  he  could  find  to  help  him, 
the  young  colonist  fell  back  on  the  education 
he  had  held  so  cheap  in  England,  and  brave- 
ly took  school-work  wherever  in  the  rising 
townships  of  the  infant  colony  he  could  find 
it.  Meanwhile  his  youth,  his  pluck,  and  his 
Oxford  distinctions  had  attracted  the  kindly 
notice  of  the  Governor,  Sir  George  Grey, 
who  offered  him  his  private  secretaryship — 
one  can  imagine  the  twinkle  in  the  Govern- 
or's eye,  when  he  first  came  across  my 

24 


EARLY    DAYS 

father  building  his  own  hut  on  his  section 
outside  Wellington!  The  offer  was  gratefully 
refused.  But  another  year  of  New  Zealand 
life  brought  reconsideration.  The  exile  be- 
gins to  speak  of  " loneliness"  in  his  letters 
home,  to  realize  that  it  is  "collision"  with 
other  kindred  minds  that  "kindles  the  spark 
of  thought,"  and  presently,  after  a  striking 
account  of  a  solitary  walk  across  unexplored 
country  in  New  Zealand,  he  confesses  that  he 
is  not  sufficient  for  himself,  and  that  the 
growth  and  vigor  of  the  intellect  were,  for  him, 
at  least,  "not  compatible  with  loneliness." 

A  few  months  later,  Sir  William  Denison, 
the  newly  appointed  Governor  of  Van  Die- 
men's  Land,  hearing  that  a  son  of  Arnold 
of  Rugby,  an  Oxford  First  Class  man,  was 
in  New  Zealand,  wrote  to  offer  my  father 
the  task  of  organizing  primary  education  in 
Van  Diemen's  Land. 

He  accepted — yet  not,  I  think,  without  a 
sharp  sense  of  defeat  at  the  hands  of  Mother 
Earth! — set  sail  for  Hobart,  and  took  pos- 
session of  a  post  that  might  easily  have  led  to 
great  things.  His  father's  fame  preceded 
him,  and  he  was  warmly  welcomed.  The 
salary  was  good  and  the  field  free.  Within 
a  few  months  of  his  landing  he  was  engaged 
to  my  mother.  They  were  married  inl850,  and 
I,  their  eldest  child,  was  born  in  June,  1851. 

25 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

And  then  the  unexpected,  the  amazing 
thing  happened.  At  the  time  of  their  mar- 
riage, and  for  some  time  after,  my  mother, 
who  had  been  brought  up  in  a  Protestant 
"scriptural"  atmosphere,  and  had  been  orig- 
inally drawn  to  the  younger  "Tom  Arnold," 
partly  because  he  was  the  son  of  his  father, 
as  Stanley's  Life  had  now  made  the  head- 
master known  to  the  world,  was  a  good  deal 
troubled  by  the  heretical  views  of  her  young 
husband.  She  had  some  difficulty  in  getting 
him  to  consent  to  the  baptism  of  his  elder 
children.  He  was  still  in  many  respects 
the  Philip  of  the  "Bothie,"  influenced  by 
Goethe,  and  the  French  romantics,  by  Emer- 
son, Kingsley,  and  Carlyle,  and  in  touch  still 
with  all  that  Liberalism  of  the  later  'forties 
in  Oxford,  of  which  his  most  intimate  friend, 
Arthur  Clough,  and  his  elder  brother,  Mat- 
thew Arnold,  were  to  become  the  foremost 
representatives.  But  all  the  while,  under 
the  surface,  an  extraordinary  transformation 
was  going  on.  He  was  never  able  to  explain 
it  afterward,  even  to  me,  who  knew  him 
best  of  all  his  children.  I  doubt  whether  he 
ever  understood  it  himself.  But  he  who  had 
only  once  crossed  the  High  Street  to  hear 
Newman  preach,  and  felt  no  interest  in  the 
sermon,  now,  on  the  other  side  of  the  world, 
surrendered  to  Newman's  influence.  It  is 


EARLY    DAYS 

uncertain  if  they  had  ever  spoken  to  each 
other  at  Oxford;  yet  that  subtle  pervasive 
intellect  which  captured  for  years  the  crit- 
ical and  skeptical  mind  of  Mark  Pattison, 
and  indirectly  transformed  the  Church  of 
England  after  Newman  himself  had  left  it, 
now,  reaching  across  the  world,  laid  hold  on 
Arnold's  son,  when  Arnold  himself  was  no 
longer  there  to  fight  it.  A  general  reaction 
against  the  negations  and  philosophies  of  his 
youth  set  in  for  "  Philip,"  as  inevitable  in  his 
case  as  the  revolt  against  St.  Sulpice  was 
for  Ernest  Renan.  For  my  father  was  in 
truth  born  for  religion,  as  his  whole  later 
life  showed.  In  that  he  was  the  true  son  of 
Arnold  of  Rugby.  But  his  speculative  Lib- 
eralism had  carried  him  so  much  farther  than 
his  father's  had  ever  gone,  that  the  recoil 
was  correspondingly  great.  The  steps  of  it 
are  dim.  He  was  " struck"  one  Sunday  with 
the  "authoritative"  tone  of  the  First  Epistle 
of  Peter.  Who  and  what  was  Peter?  What 
justified  such  a  tone?  At  another  time  he 
found  a  Life  of  St.  Brigit  of  Sweden  at  a 
country  inn,  when  he  was  on  one  of  his 
school-inspecting  journeys  across  the  island. 
And  he  records  a  mysterious  influence  or 
" voice"  from  it,  as  he  rode  in  meditative 
solitude  through  the  sunny  spaces  of  the 

Tasmanian  bush,  Last  of  all,  he  "obtained" 

27 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

— from  England,  no  doubt —  the  Tracts  for 
the  Times.  And  as  he  went  through  them, 
the  same  documents,  and  the  same  argu- 
ments, which  had  taken  Newman  to  Rome, 
nine  years  before,  worked  upon  his  late  and 
distant  disciple.  But  who  can  explain  "  con- 
version"? Is  it  not  enough  to  say,  as  was 
said  of  old,  "The  Holy  Ghost  fell  on  them 
that  believed"?  The  great  "Malignant" 
had  indeed  triumphed.  In  October,  1854, 
my  father  was  received  at  Hobart,  Tasmania, 
into  the  Church  of  Rome;  and  two  years 
later,  after  he  had  reached  England,  and 
written  to  Newman  asking  the  new  Father 
of  the  Oratory  to  receive  him,  Newman 
replied: 

How  strange  it  seems!  What  a  world  this  is! 
I  knew  your  father  a  little,  and  I  really  think 
I  never  had  any  unkind  feeling  toward  him. 
I  saw  him  at  Oriel  on  the  Purification  before 
(I  think)  his  death  (January,  1842).  I  was  glad 
to  meet  him.  If  I  said  ever  a  harsh  thing  against 
him  I  am  very  sorry  for  it.  In  seeing  you,  I 
should  have  a  sort  of  pledge  that  he  at  the 
moment  of  his  death  made  it  all  up  with  me. 
Excuse  this.  I  came  here  last  night,  and  it  is  so 
marvelous  to  have  your  letter  this  morning. 

So,  for  the  moment,  ended  one  incident 
in  the  long  bout  between  two  noble  fighters, 

28 


EARLY    DAYS 

Arnold  and  Newman,  each  worthy  of  the 
other's  steel.  For  my  father,  indeed,  this 
act  of  surrender  was  but  the  beginning  of  a 
long  and  troubled  history.  My  poor  mother 
felt  as  though  the  earth  had  crumbled  under 
her.  Her  passionate  affection  for  my  father 
endured  tih1  her  latest  hour,  but  she  never 
reconciled  herself  to  what  he  had  done. 
There  was  in  her  an  instinctive  dread  of 
Catholicism,  of  which  I  have  suggested  some 
of  the  origins — ancestral  and  historical.  It 
never  abated.  Many  years  afterward,  in 
writing  Helbeck  of  Bannisdale,  I  drew  upon 
what  I  remembered  of  it  in  describing  some 
traits  in  Laura  Fountain's  inbred,  and  finally 
indomitable,  resistance  to  the  Catholic  claim 
upon  the  will  and  intellect  of  men. 

And  to  this  trial  in  the  realm  of  religious 
feeling  there  were  added  all  the  practical 
difficulties  into  which  my  father's  action 
plunged  her  and  his  children.  The  Tas- 
manian  appointment  had  to  be  given  up, 
for  the  feeling  in  the  colony  was  strongly 
anti-Catholic;  and  we  came  home,  as  I  have 
described,  to  a  life  of  struggle,  privation, 
and  constant  anxiety,  in  which  my  mother 
suffered  not  only  for  herself,  but  for  her 
children. 

But,  after  ah1,  there  were  bright  spots. 
My  father  and  mother  were  young;  my 

29 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

mother's  eager,  sympathetic  temper  brought 
her  many  friends;  and  for  us  children,  Fox 
How  and  its  dear  inmates  opened  a  second 
home,  and  new  joys,  which  upon  myself  in 
particular  left  impressions  never  to  be  ef- 
faced or  undone.  Let  me  try  and  describe 
that  house  and  garden  and  those  who  lived 
in  it,  as  they  were  in  1856. 


CHAPTER  II 

FOX   HOW 

""THE  gray-stone  house  stands  now,  as  it 
*-  stood  then,  on  a  "how"  or  rising 
ground  in  the  beautiful  Westmorland  valley 
leading  from  Ambleside  to  Rydal.  The 
"Doctor"  built  it  as  a  holiday  paradise  for 
himself  and  his  children,  in  the  year  1833. 
It  is  a  modest  building,  with  ten  bedrooms 
and  three  sitting-rooms.  Its  windows  look 
straight  into  the  heart  of  Fairfield,  the  beau- 
tiful semicircular  mountain  which  rears  its 
hollowed  front  and  buttressing  scaurs  against 
the  north,  far  above  the  green  floor  of  the 
valley.  That  the  house  looked  north  never 
troubled  my  grandfather  or  his  children. 
What  they  cared  for  was  the  perfect  outline 
of  the  mountain  wall,  the  "pensive  glooms," 
hovering  in  that  deep  breast  of  Fairfield, 
the  magic  never-ending  chase  of  sunlight  and 
cloud  across  it  on  fine  days,  and  the  beauty 
of  the  soft  woodland  clothing  its  base.  The 
garden  was  his  children's  joy  as  it  became 
mine.  Its  little  beck  with  its  mimic  bridges, 
its  encircling  river,  its  rocky  knolls,  its  wild 
strawberries  and  wild  raspberries,  its  queen 

31 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

of  birch-trees  rearing  a  stately  head  against 
the  distant  mountain,  its  rhododendrons 
growing  like  weeds  on  its  mossy  banks,  its 
velvet  turf,  and  long  silky  grass  in  the  parts 
left  wild — all  these  things  have  made  the  joy 
of  three  generations. 

Inside,  Fox  How  was  comfortably  spa- 
cious, and  I  remember  what  a  palace  it  ap- 
peared to  my  childish  eyes,  fresh  from  the 
tiny  cabin  of  a  400-ton  sailing-ship,  and  the 
rough  life  of  a  colony.  My  grandmother, 
its  mistress,  was  then  sixty-one.  Her  beau- 
tiful hair  was  scarcely  touched  with  gray, 
her  complexion  was  still  delicately  clear, 
and  her  soft  brown  eyes  had  the  eager,  sym- 
pathetic look  of  her  Cornish  race.  Charlotte 
Bronte,  who  saw  her  a  few  years  earlier, 
while  on  a  visit  to  Miss  Martineau,  speaks 
of  her  as  having  been  a  "very  pretty  wom- 
an," and  credits  her  and  her  daughters  with 
"the  possession  of  qualities  the  most  esti- 
mable and  endearing."  In  another  letter, 
however,  written  to  a  less  familiar  corre- 
spondent, to  whom  Miss  Bronte,  as  the  liter- 
ary lady  with  a  critical  reputation  to  keep 
up,  expresses  herself  in  a  different  and  more 
artificial  tone,  she  again  describes  my  grand- 
mother as  good  and  charming,  but  doubts  her 
claim  to  "power  and  completeness  of  char- 
acter." The  phrase  occurs  in  a  letter  de- 

32 


FOX    HOW 

scribing  a  call  at  Fox  How,  and  its  slight 
pomposity  makes  the  contrast  with  the 
passage  in  which  Matthew  Arnold  describes 
the  same  visit  the  more  amusing. 

At  seven  came  Miss  Martineau,  and  Miss 
Bronte  (Jane  Eyre);  talked  to  Miss  Martineau 
(who  blasphemes  frightfully)  about  the  prospects 
of  the  Church  of  England,  and,  wretched  man 
that  I  am,  promised  to  go  and  see  her  cow- 
keeping  miracles  to-morrow,  I  who  hardly  know 
a  cow  from  a  sheep.  I  talked  to  Miss  Bronte 
(past  thirty  and  plain,  with  expressive  gray 
eyes,  though)  of  her  curates,  of  French  novels, 
and  her  education  hi  a  school  at  Brussels,  and 
sent  the  lions  roaring  to  their  dens  at  half-past 
nine. 

No  one,  indeed,  would  have  applied  the 
word  " power"  to  my  grandmother,  unless 
he  had  known  her  very  well.  The  general 
impression  was  always  one  of  gentle  sweet- 
ness and  soft  dignity.  But  the  phrase,  "  com- 
pleteness of  character,"  happens  to  sum  up 
very  well  the  impression  left  by  her  life 
both  on  kindred  and  friends.  What  Miss 
Bronte  exactly  meant  by  it  it  is  difficult  to 
say.  But  the  widowed  mother  of  nine  chil- 
dren, five  of  them  sons,  and  all  of  them  pos- 
sessed of  strong  wills  and  quick  intelligence, 
who  was  able  so  to  guide  their  young  lives 

33 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

that  to  her  last  hour,  thirty  years  after  her 
husband's  death  had  left  her  alone  with  her 
task,  she  possessed  their  passionate  rever- 
ence and  affection,  and  that  each  and  all  of 
them  would  have  acknowledged  her  as  among 
the  dearest  and  noblest  influences  in  their 
lives,  can  hardly  be  denied  "  completeness  of 
character."  Many  of  her  letters  lie  before 
me.  Each  son  and  daughter,  as  he  or  she 
went  out  into  the  world,  received  them  with 
the  utmost  regularity.  They  knew  that 
every  incident  in  their  lives  interested  their 
mother;  and  they  in  their  turn  were  eager 
to  report  to  her  everything  that  came  to 
them,  happy  or  unhappy,  serious  or  amusing. 
And  this  relation  of  the  family  to  their 
mother  only  grew  and  strengthened  with 
years.  As  the  daughters  married,  their  hus- 
bands became  so  many  new  and  devoted  sons 
to  this  gentle,  sympathetic,  and  yet  firm- 
natured  woman.  Nor  were  the  daughters- 
in-law  less  attached  to  her,  and  the  grand- 
children who  in  due  time  began  to  haunt 
Fox  How.  In  my  own  life  I  trace  her  letters 
from  my  earliest  childhood,  through  my  life 
at  school,  to  my  engagement  and  marriage; 
and  I  have  never  ceased  to  feel  a  pang  of 
disappointment  that  she  died  before  my 
children  were  born.  Matthew  Arnold  adored 
her,  and  wrote  to  her  every  week  of  his  life. 

34 


FOX    HOW 

So  did  her  other  children.  William  Forster, 
throughout  his  busy  life  in  Parliament,  vied 
with  her  sons  in  tender  consideration  and 
unfailing  loyalty.  And  every  grandchild 
thought  of  a  visit  to  Fox  How  as  not  only  a 
joy,  but  an  honor.  Indeed,  nothing  could 
have  been  more  "complete,"  more  rounded, 
than  my  grandmother's  character  and  life 
as  they  developed  through  her  eighty-three 
years.  She  made  no  conspicuous  intellectual 
claim,  though  her  quick  intelligence,  her  wide 
sympathies,  and  clear  judgment,  combined 
with  something  ardent  and  responsive  in  her 
temperament,  attracted  and  held  able  men; 
but  her  personality  was  none  the  less  strong 
because  it  was  so  gently,  delicately  served  by 
looks  and  manner. 

Perhaps  the  "  completeness  "  of  my  grand- 
mother's character  will  be  best  illustrated  by 
one  of  her  family  letters,  a  letter  which  may 
recall  to  some  readers  Stevenson's  delightful 
poem  on  the  mother  who  sits  at  home, 
watching  the  fledglings  depart  from  the  nest. 

So  from  the  hearth  the  children  flee, 

By  that  almighty  hand 
Austerely  led;   so  one  by  sea 

Goes  forth,  and  one  by  land; 

Nor  aught  of  all  -man's  sons  escapes  from  that 
command. 


35 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

And  as  the  fervent  smith  of  yore 

Beat  out  the  glowing  blade, 
Nor  wielded  in  the  front  of  war 

The  weapons  that  he  made, 

But  in  the  tower  at  home  still  plied  his  ringing 
trade; 

So  like  a  sword  the  son  shall  roam 

On  nobler  missions  sent; 
And  as  the  smith  remained  at  home 

In  peaceful  turret  pent, 

So  sits  the  while  at  home  the  mother  well 
content. 

The  letter  was  written  to  my  father  'in 
New  Zealand  in  the  year  1848,  as  a  family 
chronicle.  The  brothers  and  sisters  named 
in  it  are  Walter,  the  youngest  of  the  family, 
a  middy  of  fourteen,  on  board  ship,  and  not 
very  happy  in  the  Navy,  which  he  was 
ultimately  to  leave  for  Durham  University 
and  business;  Willy,  in  the  Indian  Army, 
afterward  the  author  of  Oakfield,  a  novel  at- 
tacking the  abuses  of  Anglo-Indian  life,  and 
the  first  Director  of  Public  Instruction  in 
the  Punjab  —  commemorated  by  his  poet 
brother  in  "A  Southern  Night";  Edward, 
at  Oxford;  Mary,  the  second  daughter,  who 
at  the  age  of  twenty-two  had  been  left  a 
widow  after  a  year  of  married  life;  and 
Fan,  the  youngest  daughter  of  the  flock, 

36 


FOX   HOW 

who  now,  in  1917,  alone  represents  them  in 
the  gray  house  under  the  fells.  The  little 
Westmorland  farm  described  is  still  exactly 
as  it  was;  and  has  still  a  Richardson  for 
master,  though  of  a  younger  generation. 
And  Rydal  Chapel,  freed  now  from  the  pink 
cement  which  clothed  it  in  those  days,  and 
from  the  high  pews  familiar  to  the  children 
of  Fox  How,  still  sends  the  cheerful  voice  of 
its  bells  through  the  valley  on  Sunday 
mornings. 

The  reader  will  remember,  as  he  reads 
it,  that  he  is  in  the  troubled  year  of  1848,  with 
Chartism  at  home  and  revolution  abroad. 
The  " painful  interest"  with  which  the  writer 
has  read  dough's  "Bothie"  refers,  I  think, 
to  the  fact  that  she  has  recognized  her  second 
son,  my  father,  as  to  some  extent  the  hero 
of  the  poem. 

Fox  How,  Nov.  19,  1848. 

MY  DEAREST  TOM, —  ...  I  am  always  intend- 
ing to  send  you  something  like  a  regular  journal, 
but  twenty  days  of  the  month  have  now  passed 
away,  and  it  is  not  done.  Dear  Matt,  who  was 
with  us  at  the  beginning,  and  who  I  think  bore  a 
part  in  our  last  letters  to  you,  has  returned  to  his 
post  in  London,  and  I  am  not  without  hope  of 
hearing  by  to-morrow's  post  that  he  has  run 
down  to  Portsmouth  to  see  Walter  before  he  sails 

on  a  cruise  with  the  Squadron,  which  I  believe  he 

37 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

was  to  do  to-day.  But  I  should  think  they 
would  hardly  leave  Port  in  such  dirty  weather, 
when  the  wind  howls  and  the  rain  pours,  and 
the  whole  atmosphere  is  thick  and  lowering  as  I 
suppose  you  rarely  or  never  see  it  in  New  Zea- 
land. I  wish  the  more  that  Matt  may  get 
down  to  Spithead,  because  the  poor  little  man 
has  been  in  a  great  ferment  about  leaving  his 
Ship  and  going  into  a  smaller  one.  By  the  same 
post  I  had  a  letter  from  him,  and  from  Captain 
Daws,  who  had  been  astonished  and  grieved  by 
Walter's  coming  to  him  and  telling  him  he  wished 
to  leave  the  ship.  It  was  evident  that  Captain 
D.  was  quite  distressed  about  it. 

She  then  discusses,  very  shrewdly  and 
quietly,  the  reasons  for  her  boy's  restless- 
ness, and  how  best  to  meet  it.  The  letter 
goes  on: 

Certainly  there  is  great  comfort  in  having  him 
with  so  true  and  good  a  friend  as  Captain  D. 
and  I  could  not  feel  justified  in  acting  against 
his  counsel.  But  as  he  gets  to  know  Walter 
better,  I  think  it  very  likely  that  he  will  himself 
think  it  better  for  him  to  be  in  some  ship  not 
so  likely  to  stay  about  in  harbor  as  the  St.  Vin- 
cent: and  will  judge  that  with  a  character  like 
his  it  might  be  better  for  him  to  be  on  some 
more  distant  stations. 

I  write  about  all  this  as  coolly  as  if  he  were  not 
my  own  dear  youngest  born,  the  little  dear  son 

38 


FOX   HOW 

whom  I  have  so  cherished,  and  who  was  almost 
a  nursling  still,  when  the  bond  which  kept  us  all 
together  was  broken.  But  I  believe  I  do  truly 
feel  that  if  my  beloved  sons  are  good  and  worthy 
of  the  name  they  bear,  are  hi  fact  true,  earnest, 
Christian  men,  I  have  no  wish  left  for  them — 
no  selfish  longings  after  their  companionship, 
which  can  for  a  moment  be  put  in  comparison 
with  such  joy.  Thus  it  almost  seemed  strange 
to  me  when,  in  a  letter  the  other  day  from  Willy 
to  Edward,  in  reference  to  his — E's — future 
destination — Willy  rather  urged  upon  him  a 
home,  domestic  life,  on  my  account,  as  my  sons 
were  already  so  scattered.  As  I  say,  those  loving 
words  seemed  strange  to  me;  because  I  have 
such  an  overpowering  feeling  that  the  all-in-all 
to  me  is  that  my  sons  should  be  hi  just  that 
vocation  in  life  most  suited  to  them,  and  most 
bringing  out  what  is  highest  and  best  hi  them; 
whether  it  might  be  hi  England,  or  at  the 
furthest  extremity  of  the  world. 

•  »  •  •  • 

November  24,  1848. — I  have  been  unwell  for 
some  days,  dearest  Tom,  and  this  makes  me  less 
active  hi  all  my  usual  employments,  but  it  shall 
not,  if  I  can  help  it,  prevent  my  making  some 
progress  in  this  letter,  which  in  less  than  a  week 
may  perhaps  be  on  its  way  to  New  Zealand.  I 
have  just  sent  Fan  down-stairs,  for  she  nurses 
her  Mother  till  I  begin  to  think  some  change  good 
for  her.  She  has  been  reading  aloud  to  me,  and 
now,  as  the  evening  advances  I  have  asked  some 

39 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

of  them  to  read  to  me  a  long  poem  by  Clough — 
(the  "Bothie")  which  I  have  no  doubt  will  reach 
you.  It  does  not  look  attractive  to  me,  for  it  is 
in  English  Hexameters,  which  are  to  me  very 
cumbrous  and  uninviting;  but  probably  that 
may  be  for  some  want  of  knowledge  hi  my  own 
ear  and  taste.  The  poem  is  addressed  to  his 
pupils  of  last  summer,  and  in  scenery,  etc.,  will 
have,  I  suppose,  many  touches  from  his  Highland 
residence;  but,  in  a  brief  Preface,  he  says  that 
the  tale  itself  is  altogether  fiction. 

To  turn  from  things  domestic  to  things  at 
large,  what  a  state  of  things  is  this  at  Berlin!  a 
state  of  siege  declared,  and  the  King  at  open 
issue  with  his  representatives! — from  the  country 
districts,  people  flocking  to  give  him  aid,  while  the 
great  towns  are  almost  hi  revolt.  "Always  too 
late"  might,  I  suppose,  have  been  his  motto; 
and  when  things  have  been  given  with  one  hand, 
he  has  seemed  too  ready  to  withdraw  them  with 
the  other.  But,  after  all,  I  must  and  do  believe 
that  he  has  noble  qualities,  so  to  have  won 
Bunsen's  love  and  respect. 

November  25. — Mary  is  preparing  a  long  letter, 
and  it  will  therefore  matter  the  less  if  mine  is  not 
so  long  as  I  intended.  I  have  not  yet  quite 
made  up  the  way  I  have  lost  hi  my  late  indisposi- 
tion, and  we  have  such  volumes  of  letters  from 
dear  Willy  to  answer,  that  I  believe  this  folio 

will  be  all  I  can  send  to  you,  my  own  darling; 

40 


FOX   HOW 

but  you  do  not  dwell  in  my  heart  or  my  thoughts 
less  fondly.  I  long  inexpressibly  to  have  some 
definite  ideas  of  what  you  are  now — after  some 
eight  months  of  residence — doing,  thinking,  feel- 
ing; what  are  your  occupations  in  the  present, 
what  your  aims  and  designs  for  the  future.  The 
assurance  that  it  is  your  first  and  heartful  desire 
to  please  God,  my  dear  son;  that  you  have  strug- 
gled to  do  this  and  not  allowed  yourself  to  shrink 
from  whatever  you  felt  to  be  involved  in  it,  this 
is,  and  will  be  my  deepest  and  dearest  comfort, 
and  I  pray  to  Him  to  guide  you  into  all  truth. 
But  though  supported  by  this  assurance,  I  do 
not  pretend  to  say  that  often  and  often  I  do 
not  yearn  over  you  hi  my  thoughts,  and  long  to 
bestow  upon  you  hi  act  and  word,  as  well  as  in 
thought,  some  of  that  overflowing  love  which  is 
cherished  for  you  in  your  home. 

And  here  follows  a  tender  mother-word  in 
reference  to  an  early  and  unrequited  at- 
tachment of  my  father's,  the  fate  of  which 
may  possibly  have  contributed  to  the  rest- 
lessness which  sent  him  beyond  the  seas. 

But,  dear  Tom,  I  believe  that  though  the 
hoped  for  flower  and  fruit  have  faded,  yet  that 
the  plant  has  been  strengthened  and  purified. 
...  It  would  be  a  grief  to  me  not  to  believe  that 
you  will  yet  be  most  happy  in  married  life; 
and  when  you  can  make  to  yourself  a  home  I 
shall  perhaps  lose  some  of  my  restless  longing  to 

41 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

be  near  you  and  ministering  to  your  comfort, 
and  sharing  in  your  life — if  I  can  think  of  you  as 
cheered  and  helped  by  one  who  loved  you  as  I 
did  your  own  beloved  father. 

Sunday,  November  26. — Just  a  year,  my  son, 
since  you  left  England!  But  I  really  must  not 
allow  myself  to  dwell  on  this,  and  all  the  thoughts 
it  brings  with  it;  for  I  found  last  night  that  the 
contrast  between  the  fulness  of  thought  and  feel- 
ing, and  my  own  powerlessness  to  express  it 
weighed  on  me  heavily;  and  not  having  yet 
quite  recovered  my  usual  tone,  I  could  not  well 
bear  it.  So  I  will  just  try  to  collect  for  you  a 
few  more  home  Memoranda,  and  then  have 
done.  .  .  .  Our  new  tenant,  James  Richardson, 
is  now  fairly  established  at  his  farm,  and  when  I 
went  up  there  and  saw  the  cradle  and  the  happy 
childish  faces  around  the  table,  and  the  rows  of 
oatmeal  cake  hanging  up,  and  the  cheerful,  active 
Mother  going  hither  and  thither — now  to  her 
Dairy — now  guiding  the  steps  of  the  little  one 
that  followed  her  about — and  all  the  time  pre- 
paring things  for  her  husband's  return  from  his 
work  at  night,  I  could  not  but  feel  that  it  was  a 
very  happy  picture  of  English  life.  Alas!  that 
there  are  not  larger  districts  where  it  exists! 
But  I  hope  there  is  still  much  of  it;  and  I  feel 
that  while  there  is  an  awful  undercurrent  of 
misery  and  ski — the  latter  both  caused  by  the 
first  and  causing  it — and  while,  on  the  surface, 
there  is  carelessness,  and  often  recklessness  and 
hardness  and  trifling,  yet  that  still,  in  our  English 

42 


FOX   HOW 

society,  there  is,  between  these  two  extremes,  a 
strength  of  good  mixed  with  baser  elements, 
which  must  and  will,  I  fully  believe,  support  us 
nationally  in  the  troublous  tunes  which  are  at 
hand — on  which  we  are  actually  entered. 

But  again  I  am  wandering,  and  now  the  others 
have  gone  off  to  the  Rydal  Chapel  without  me 
this  lovely  Sunday  morning.  There  are  the  bells 
sounding  invitingly  across  the  valley,  and  the 
evergreens  are  white  and  sparkling  in  the  sun. 

I  have  a  note  from  Clough.  .  .  .  His  poem  is 
as  remarkable,  I  think,  as  you  would  expect, 
coming  from  him.  Its  power  quite  overcame 
my  dislike  to  the  measure — so  far  at  least  as 
to  make  me  read  it  with  great  interest — often, 
though,  a  painful  one.  And  now  I  must  end. 

As  to  Miss  Bronte's  impressions  of  Mat- 
thew Arnold  in  that  same  afternoon  call  of 
1850,  they  were  by  no  means  flattering.  She 
understands  that  he  was  already  the  author 
of  "a  volume  of  poems"  (The  Poems  by 
A,  1849),  remarks  that  his  manner  " dis- 
pleases from  its  seeming  foppery,"  but 
recognizes,  nevertheless,  in  conversation  with 
him,  "some  genuine  intellectual  aspirations"! 
It  was  but  a  few  years  later  that  my  uncle 
paid  his  poet's  homage  to  the  genius  of  the 
two  sisters — to  Charlotte  of  the  "expres- 
sive gray  eyes"  —to  Emily  of  the  "chainless 

soul."    I  often  try  to  picture  their  meeting 

43 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

in  the  Fox  How  drawing-room:  Matthew 
Arnold,  tall,  handsome,  in  the  rich  opening 
of  his  life,  his  first  poetic  honors  thick  upon 
him,  looking  with  a  half -critical,  half -humor- 
ous eye  at  the  famous  little  lady  whom  Miss 
Martineau  had  brought  to  call  upon  his 
mother;  and  beside  him  that  small,  intrepid 
figure,  on  which  the  worst  storms  of  life  had 
already  beaten,  which  was  but  five  short 
years  from  its  own  last  rest.  I  doubt  whether, 
face  to  face,  they  would  ever  have  made 
much  of  each  other.  But  the  sister  who 
could  write  of  a  sister's  death  as  Charlotte 
wrote,  in  the  letter  that  every  lover  of  great 
prose  ought  to  have  by  heart — 

Emily  suffers  no  more  from  pain  or  weakness 
now,  she  never  will  suffer  more  in  this  world. 
She  is  gone,  after  a  hard,  short  conflict.  .  .  . 
We  are  very  calm  at  present,  why  should  we  be 
otherwise?  The  anguish  of  seeing  her  suffer  is 
over;  the  spectacle  of  the  pains  of  death  is  gone; 
the  funeral  day  is  past.  We  feel  she  is  at  peace. 
No  need  now  to  tremble  for  the  hard  frost  and 
the  keen  wind.  Emily  does  not  feel  them. — 

must  have  stretched  out  spiritual  hands  to 
Matthew  Arnold,  had  she  lived  to  read  "A 
Southern  Night"  —that  loveliest,  surely,  of 
all  laments  of  brother  for  brother. 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  FAMILY   OF  FOX  HOW 

p\OCTOR  ARNOLD'S  eldest  daughter, 
***  Jane  Arnold,  afterward  Mrs.  W.  E. 
Forster,  my  godmother,  stands  out  for  me 
on  the  tapestry  of  the  past,  as  one  of  the 
noblest  personalities  I  have  ever  known. 
She  was  twenty-one  when  her  father  died,  and 
she  had  been  his  chief  companion  among  his 
children  for  years  before  death  took  him 
from  her.  He  taught  her  Latin  and  Greek, 
he  imbued  her  with  his  own  political  and 
historical  interests,  and  her  ardent  Christian 
faith  answered  to  his  own.  After  his  death 
she  was  her  mother's  right  hand  at  Fox  How; 
and  her  letters  to  her  brothers — to  my  father, 
especially,  since  he  was  longest  and  farthest 
away — show  her  quick  and  cultivated  mind, 
and  all  the  sweetness  of  her  nature.  We  hear 
of  her  teaching  a  younger  brother  Latin  and 
Greek;  she  goes  over  to  Miss  Martineau  on 
the  other  side  of  the  valley  to  translate  some 
German  for  that  busy  woman;  she  reads 
Dante  beside  her  mother,  when  the  rest  of 
the  family  have  gone  to  bed ;  she  sympathizes 
passionately  with  Mazzini  and  Garibaldi; 

45 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

and  every  week  she  walks  over  Loughrigg 
through  fair  weather  and  foul,  summer  and 
winter,  to  teach  in  a  night  school  at  Skelwith. 
Then  the  young  Quaker  manufacturer,  Will- 
iam Forster,  appears  on  the  scene,  and  she 
falls  happily  and  completely  in  love.  Her 
letters  to  the  brother  in  New  Zealand  be- 
come, in  a  moment,  all  joy  and  ardor,  and 
nothing  could  be  prettier  than  the  account, 
given  by  one  of  the  sisters,  of  the  quiet  wed- 
ding in  Rydal  Chapel,  the  family  breakfast, 
the  bride's  simple  dress  and  radiant  look, 
Matthew  Arnold  giving  his  sister  away— 
with  the  great  fells  standing  sentinel.  And 
there  exists  a  delightful  unpublished  letter  by 
Harriet  Martineau  which  gives  some  idea  of 
the  excitement  roused  in  the  quiet  Ambleside 
valley  by  Jane  Arnold's  engagement  to  the 
tall  Yorkshireman  who  came  from  surround- 
ings so  different  from  the  academic  and 
scholarly  world  in  which  the  Arnolds  had 
been  brought  up. 

Then  followed  married  life  at  Rawdon  near 
Bradford,  with  supreme  happiness  at  home, 
and  many  and  growing  interests  in  the  manu- 
facturing, religious,  and  social  life  around  the 
young  wife.  In  1861  William  Forster  be- 
came member  for  Bradford,  and  in  1869 
Gladstone  included  him  in  that  Ministry  of 
all  the  talents,  which  foundered  under  the 

46 


THE    FAMILY   OF   FOX   HOW 

onslaughts  of  Disraeli  in  1874.  Forster  be- 
came Vice-President  of  the  Council,  which 
meant  Minister  for  Education,  with  a  few 
other  trifles  like  the  cattle-plague  thrown  in. 
The  Education  Bill,  which  William  Forster 
brought  in  in  1870  (as  a  girl  of  eighteen,  I 
was  in  the  Ladies'  Gallery  of  the  House  of 
Commons  on  the  great  day  to  hear  his 
speech),  has  been  the  foundation-stone  ever 
since  of  English  popular  education.  It  has 
always  been  clear  to  me  that  the  scheme  of 
the  bill  was  largely  influenced  by  William 
Forster's  wife,  and,  through  her,  by  the  con- 
victions and  beliefs  of  her  father.  The  com- 
promise by  which  the  Church  schools,  with 
the  creeds  and  the  Church  catechism,  were 
preserved,  under  a  conscience  clause,  while 
the  dissenters  got  their  way  as  to  the  banish- 
ment of  creeds  and  catechisms,  and  the  sub- 
stitution for  them  of  "simple  Bible-teach- 
ing," in  the  schools  founded  under  the  new 
School  Boards,  which  the  bill  set  up  all  over 
England,  has  practically — with,  of  course, 
modifications — held  its  ground  for  nearly 
half  a  century.  It  was  illogical;  and  the  dis- 
senters have  never  ceased  to  resent  the  per- 
petuation of  the  Church  school  which  it 
achieved.  But  English  life  is  illogical.  It 
met  the  real  situation;  and  it  would  never 
have  taken  the  shape  it  did — in  my  opinion — 

47 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

but  for  the  ardent  beliefs  of  the  young  and 
remarkable  woman,  at  once  a  strong  Liberal 
and  a  devoted  daughter  of  the  English 
Church,  as  Arnold,  Kingsley,  and  Maurice 
understood  it,  who  had  married  her  Quaker 
husband  in  1850X  and  had  thereby  been  the 
innocent  cause  of  his  automatic  severance 
from  the  Quaker  body.  His  respect  for  her 
judgment  and  intellectual  power  was  only 
equaled  by  his  devotion  to  her.  And  when 
the  last  great  test  of  his  own  life  came,  how 
she  stood  by  him! — through  those  terrible 
days  of  the  Land  League  struggle,  when,  as 
Chief  Secretary  for  Ireland,  Forster  carried 
his  life  in  his  hand  month  after  month,  to  be 
worn  out  finally  by  the  double  toil  of  Parlia- 
ment and  Ireland,  and  to  die  just  before 
Mr.  Gladstone  split  the  Liberal  party  in 
1886,  by  the  introduction  of  the  Home  Rule 
Bill,  in  which  Forster  would  not  have  fol- 
lowed him. 

I  shall,  however,  have  something  to  say 
later  on  in  these  Reminiscences  about  those 
tragic  days.  To  those  who  watched  Mrs. 
Forster  through  them,  and  who  knew  her 
intimately,  she  was  one  of  the  most  interest- 
ing figures  of  that  crowded  time.  Few  people, 
however,  outside  the  circle  of  her  kindred, 
knew  her  intimately.  She  was,  of  course, 
in  the  ordinary  social  and  political  world, 

48 


both  before  and  after  her  husband's  entrance 
upon  office,  and  admission  to  the  Cabinet; 
dining  out  and  receiving  at  home;  attending 
Drawing-rooms  and  public  functions;  stay- 
ing at  country  houses,  and  invited  to  Wind- 
sor, like  other  Ministers'  wives,  and  keenly 
interested  in  all  the  varying  fortunes  of 
Forster's  party.  But  though  she  was  in 
that  world,  she  was  never  truly  of  it.  She 
moved  through  it,  yet  veiled  from  it,  by 
that  pure,  unconscious  selflessness  which  is 
the  saint's  gift.  Those  who  ask  nothing  for 
themselves,  whose  whole  strength  is  spent  on 
affections  that  are  their  life,  and  on  ideals 
at  one  with  their  affections,  are  not  easily 
popular,  like  the  self-seeking,  parti-colored 
folk  who  make  up  the  rest  of  us;  who  flatter, 
caress,  and  court,  that  we  in  our  turn  may 
be  flattered  and  courted.  Their  gentleness 
masks  the  indomitable  soul  within;  and  so 
their  fellows  are  often  unaware  of  their  true 
spiritual  rank. 

It  is  interesting  to  recall  the  instinctive 
sympathy  with  which  a  nature  so  different 
from  Charlotte  Bronte's  as  that  of  Arnold's 
eldest  daughter,  met  the  challenge  of  the 
Bronte  genius.  It  would  not  have  been 
wonderful — in  those  days — if  the  quiet  Fox 
How  household,  with  its  strong  religious  at- 
mosphere, its  daily  psalms  and  lessons,  its 

49 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

love  for  The  Christian  Year,  its  belief  in 
" discipline"  (how  that  comes  out  in  all  the 
letters!)  had  been  repelled  by  the  blunt 
strength  of  Jane  Eyre;  just  as  it  would  not 
have  been  wonderful  if  they  had  held  aloof 
from  Miss  Martineau,  in  the  days  when  it 
pleased  that  remarkable  woman  to  preach 
mesmeric  atheism,  or  atheistic  mesmerism, 
as  we  choose  to  put  it.  But  there  was  a  life- 
long friendship  between  them  and  Harriet 
Martineau;  and  they  recognized  at  once  the 
sincerity  and  truth — the  literary  rank,  in 
fact — of  Jane  Eyre.  Not  long  after  her  mar- 
riage, Jane  Forster  with  her  husband  went 
over  to  Haworth  to  see  Charlotte  Bronte. 
My  aunt's  letter,  describing  the  visit  to  the 
dismal  parsonage  and  church,  is  given  with- 
out her  name  in  Mrs.  GaskelPs  Life,  and 
Mr.  Shorter,  in  reprinting  it  in  the  second  of 
his  large  volumes,  does  not  seem  to  be  aware 
of  the  identity  of  the  writer. 

Miss  Bronte  put  me  so  in  mind  of  her  own 
Jane  Eyre  [wrote  my  godmother].  She  looked 
smaller  than  ever,  and  moved  about  so  quietly 
and  noiselessly,  just  like  a  little  bird,  as  Rochester 
called  her;  except  that  all  birds  are  joyous,  and 
that  joy  can  never  have  entered  that  house  since 
it  was  built.  And  yet,  perhaps,  when  that  old 
man  (Mr.  Bronte)  married  and  took  home  his 
bride,  and  children's  voices  and  feet  were  heard 

50 


THE    FAMILY    OF    FOX    HOW 

about  the  house,  even  that  desolate  graveyard 
and  biting  blast  could  not  quench  cheerfulness 
and  hope.  Now  (i.  e.  since  the  deaths  of  Emily 
and  Anne)  there  is  something  touching  in  the 
sight  of  that  little  creature  entombed  in  such  a 
place,  and  moving  about  herself  there  like  a 
spirit;  especially  when  you  think  that  the  slight 
still  frame  incloses  a  force  of  strong,  fiery  life, 
which  nothing  has  been  able  to  freeze  or 
extinguish. 

This  letter  was  written  before  my  birth 
and  about  six  years  before  the  writer  of  it  ap- 
peared, as  an  angel  of  help,  in  the  dingy  dock- 
side  inn,  where  we  tired  travelers  had  taken 
shelter  on  our  arrival  from  the  other  side  of 
the  world,  and  where  I  was  first  kissed  by  my 
godmother.  As  I  grew  up  into  girlhood, 
"Aunt  K."  (K.  was  the  pet  name  by  which 
Matthew  Arnold  always  wrote  to  her)  be- 
came for  me  part  of  the  magic  of  Fox  How, 
though  I  saw  her,  of  course,  often  in  her  own 
home  also.  I  felt  toward  her  a  passionate 
and  troubled  affection.  She  was  to  me  "a 
thing  enskied"  and  heavenly — for  all  her 
quick  human  interests,  and  her  sweet  ways 
with  those  she  loved.  How  could  any  one 
be  so  good! — was  often  the  despairing  reflec- 
tion of  the  child  who  adored  her,  caught  her- 
self in  the  toils  of  a  hot  temper  and  a  stub- 
born will;  but  all  the  same,  to  see  her  enter 

i.— 5  51 


A   WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

a  room  was  joy,  and  to  sit  by  her  the  highest 
privilege.  I  don't  know  whether  she  could 
be  strictly  called  beautiful.  But  to  me  every- 
thing about  her  was  beautiful — her  broad 
brow,  her  clear  brown  eyes  and  wavy  brown 
hair,  the  touch  of  stately  grace  with  which 
she  moved,  the  mouth  so  responsive  and 
soft,  yet,  at  need,  so  determined,  the  hand 
so  delicate,  yet  so  characteristic. 

She  was  the  eldest  of  nine.  Of  her  rela- 
tion to  the  next  of  them — her  brother  Mat- 
thew— there  are  many  indications  in  the  col- 
lection of  my  uncle's  letters,  edited  by  Mr. 
George  Russell.  It  was  to  her  that  "Resig- 
nation "  was  addressed,  in  recollection  of  their 
mountain  walks  and  talks  together;  and  in 
a  letter  to  her,  the  Sonnet  "  To  Shakespeare," 
"  Others  abide  our  question — thou  art  free," 
was  first  written  out.  Their  affection  for 
each  other,  in  spite  of  profound  differences  of 
opinion,  only  quickened  and  deepened  with 
time. 

Between  my  father  and  his  elder  brother 
Matthew  Arnold  there  was  barely  a  year's 
difference  of  age.  The  elder  was  born  in 
December,  1822,  and  the  younger  in  Novem- 
ber, 1823.  They  were  always  warmly  at- 
tached to  each  other,  and  in  spite  of  much 
that  was  outwardly  divergent — sharply  di- 

52 


THE   FAMILY   OF   FOX   HOW 

vergent — they  were  more  alike  fundamen- 
tally than  was  often  suspected.  Both  had 
derived  from  some  remoter  ancestry — pos- 
sibly through  their  Cornish  mother,  herself 
the  daughter  of  a  Penrose  and  a  Trevenen— 
elements  and  qualities  which  were  lacking 
in  the  strong  personality  of  their  father. 
Imagination,  "  rebellion  against  fact,"  spirit- 
uality, a  tendency  to  dream,  unworldliness, 
the  passionate  love  of  beauty  and  charm, 
"  ineffectualness "  in  the  practical  competi- 
tive life — these,  according  to  Matthew  Ar- 
nold, when  he  came  to  lecture  at  Oxford  on 
"The  Study  of  Celtic  Literature,"  were  and 
are  the  characteristic  marks  of  the  Celt. 
They  were  unequally  distributed  between  the 
two  brothers.  "Unworldliness,"  "rebellion 
against  fact,"  "  ineffectualness "  in  common 
life,  fell  rather  to  my  father's  share  than  my 
uncle's;  though  my  uncle's  "  worldliness,"  of 
which  he  was  sometimes  accused,  if  it  ever 
existed,  was  never  more  than  skin-deep. 
Imagination  in  my  father  led  to  a  lifelong 
and  mystical  preoccupation  with  religion;  it 
made  Matthew  Arnold  one  of  the  great  poets 
of  the  nineteenth  century. 

There  is  a  sketch  of  my  father  made  in 
1847,  which  preserves  the  dreamy,  sensitive 
look  of  early  youth,  when  he  was  the  center 
of  a  band  of  remarkable  friends — Clough, 

53 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

Stanley,  F.  T.  Palgrave,  Alfred  Domett 
(Browning's  Waring),  and  others.  It  is  the 
face — nobly  and  delicately  cut — of  one  to 
whom  the  successes  of  the  practical,  com- 
petitive life  could  never  be  of  the  same  im- 
portance as  those  events  which  take  place  in 
thought,  and  for  certain  minds  are  the  only 
real  events.  "For  ages  and  ages  the  world 
has  been  constantly  slipping  ever  more  and 
more  out  of  the  Celt's  grasp,"  wrote  Matthew 
Arnold.  But  all  the  while  the  Celt  has  great 
compensations.  To  him  belongs  another 
world  than  the  visible;  the  world  of  phantas- 
magoria, of  emotion,  the  world  of  passionate 
beginnings,  rather  than  of  things  achieved. 
After  the  romantic  and  defiant  days  of  his 
youth,  my  father,  still  pursuing  the  same 
natural  tendency,  found  all  that  he  needed 
in  Catholicism,  and  specially,  I  think,  in  that 
endless  poetry  and  mystery  of  the  Mass  which 
keeps  Catholicism  alive. 

Matthew  Arnold  was  very  different  in  out- 
ward aspect.  The  face,  strong  and  rugged, 
the  large  mouth,  the  broad  lined  brow,  and 
vigorous  coal-black  hair,  bore  no  resem- 
blance, except  for  that  fugitive  yet  vigorous 
something  which  we  call " family  likeness,"  to 
either  his  father  or  mother — still  less  to  the 
brother  so  near  to  him  in  age.  But  the 
Celtic  trace  is  there,  though  derived,  I  have 

54 


THE    FAMILY   OF   FOX   HOW 

sometimes  thought,  rather  from  an  Irish  than 
a  Cornish  source.  Doctor  Arnold's  mother, 
Martha  Delafield,  according  to  a  genealogy 
I  see  no  reason  to  doubt,  was  partly  of  Irish 
blood;  one  finds,  at  any  rate,  Fitzgeralds  and 
Dillons  among  the  names  of  her  forebears. 
And  I  have  seen  in  Ireland  faces  belonging  to 
the  " black  Celt"  type — faces  full  of  power 
and  humor,  and  softness,  visibly  molded  out 
of  the  good  common  earth  by  the  nimble 
spirit  within,  which  have  reminded  me  of 
my  uncle.  Nothing,  indeed,  at  first  sight 
could  have  been  less  romantic  or  dreamy  than 
his  outer  aspect.  "Ineffectualness"  was  not 
to  be  thought  of  in  connection  with  him. 
He  stood  four-square — a  courteous,  com- 
petent man  of  affairs,  an  admirable  inspector 
of  schools,  a  delightful  companion,  a  guest 
whom  everybody  wanted  and  no  one  could 
bind  for  long;  one  of  the  sanest,  most  in- 
dependent, most  cheerful  and  lovable  of 
mortals.  Yet  his  poems  show  what  was  the 
real  inner  life  and  genius  of  the  man;  how 
rich  in  that  very  " emotion,"  "love  of  beauty 
and  charm,"  "rebellion  against  fact,"  "spir- 
ituality," "melancholy"  which  he  himself 
catalogued  as  the  cradle  gifts  of  the  Celt. 
Crossed,  indeed,  always,  with  the  Rugby 
"earnestness,"  with  that  in  him  which  came 
to  him  from  his  father. 

55 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

It  is  curious  to  watch  the  growing  percep- 
tion of  "Matt's"  powers  among  the  circle  of 
his  nearest  kin,  as  it  is  reflected  in  these 
family  letters  to  the  emigrant  brother,  which 
reached  him  across  the  seas  from  1847  to 
1856,  and  now  lie  under  my  hand.  The 
Poems  by  A.  came  out,  as  all  lovers  of  Eng- 
lish poetry  know,  in  1849.  My  grandmother 
writes  to  my  father  in  March  of  that  year, 
after  protesting  that  she  has  not  much  news 
to  give  him: 

But  the  little  volume  of  Poems! — that  is  indeed 
a  subject  of  new  and  very  great  interest.  By 
degrees  we  hear  more  of  public  opinion  concern- 
ing them,  and  I  am  very  much  mistaken  if  their 
power  both  in  thought  and  execution  is  not  more 
and  more  felt  and  acknowledged.  I  had  a  letter 
from  dear  Miss  Fenwick  to-day,  whose  first  im- 
pressions were  that  they  were  by  you,  for  it 
seems  she  had  heard  of  the  volume  as  much 
admired,  and  as  by  one  of  the  family,  and  she  had 
hardly  thought  it  could  be  by  one  so  moving 
in  the  busy  haunts  of  men  as  dear  Matt.  .  .  . 
Matt  himself  says:  "I  have  learned  a  good  deal 
as  to  what  is  practicable  from  the  objections  of 
people,  even  when  I  thought  them  not  reason- 
able, and  hi  some  degree  they  may  determine  my 
course  as  to  publishing;  e.g.,  I  had  thoughts  of 
publishing  another  volume  of  short  poems  next 
spring,  and  a  tragedy  I  have  long  had  in  my 
head,  the  spring  after:  at  present  I  shall  leave 

66 


THE    FAMILY    OF    FOX    HOW 

the  short  poems  to  take  their  chance,  only  writing 
them  when  I  cannot  help  it,  and  try  to  get  on  with 
my  Tragedy  ('Merope'),  which  however  will 
not  be  a  very  quick  affair.  But  as  that  must 
be  in  a  regular  and  usual  form,  it  may  per- 
haps, if  it  succeeds,  enable  me  to  use  meters 
in  short  poems  which  seem  proper  to  myself; 
whether  they  suit  the  habits  of  readers  at  first 
sight  or  not.  But  all  this  is  rather  vague  at 
present.  ...  I  think  I  am  getting  quite  indif- 
ferent about  the  book.  I  have  given  away  the 
only  copy  I  had,  and  now  never  look  at  them. 
The  most  enthusiastic  people  about  them  are 
young  men  of  course;  but  I  have  heard  of  one 
or  two  people  who  found  pleasure  in  'Resigna- 
tion,' and  poems  of  that  stamp,  which  is  what 
I  like." 

"The  most  enthusiastic  people  about  them 
are  young  men,  of  course."  The  sentence 
might  stand  as  the  motto  of  all  poetic  be- 
ginnings. The  young  poet  writes  first  of  all 
for  the  young  of  his  own  day.  They  make 
his  bodyguard.  They  open  to  him  the  gates 
of  the  House  of  Fame.  But  if  the  divine 
power  is  really  his,  it  soon  frees  itself  from  the 
shackles  of  Time  and  Circumstance.  The 
true  poet  becomes,  in  the  language  of  the 
Greek  epigram  on  Homer,  "the  ageless 
mouth  of  all  the  world."  And  if  "The 
Strayed  Reveller,"  and  the  Sonnet  "To 
Shakespeare,"  and  "Resignation,"  delighted 

57 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

those  who  were  young  in  1849,  that  same 
generation,  as  the  years  passed  over  it,  in- 
stead of  outgrowing  their  poet,  took  him  all 
the  more  closely  to  their  hearts.  Only  so 
can  we  explain  the  steady  spread  and  deep- 
ening of  his  poetic  reputation  which  befell 
my  uncle  up  to  the  very  end  of  his  life,  and 
had  assured  him  by  then — leaving  out  of 
count  the  later  development  of  his  influence 
both  in  the  field  of  poetry  and  elsewhere — 
his  place  in  the  history  of  English  literature. 
But  his  entry  as  a  poet  was  gradual,  and 
but  little  heralded,  compared  to  the  debuts 
of  our  own  time.  Here  is  an  interesting  ap- 
preciation from  his  sister  Mary,  about  whom 
I  shall  have  more  to  say  presently.  At  the 
time  this  letter  was  written,  in  1849,  she  was 
twenty-three,  and  already  a  widow,  after  a 
tragic  year  of  married  life  during  which  her 
young  husband  had  developed  paralysis  of  the 
brain.  She  was  living  in  London,  attending 
Bedford  College,  and  F.  D.  Maurice's  ser- 
mons, much  influenced,  like  her  brothers,  by 
Emerson  and  Carlyle,  and  at  this  moment  a 
fine,  restless,  immature  creature,  much  younger 
than  her  years  in  some  respects,  and  much 
older  in  others — with  worlds  hitherto  unsus- 
pected in  the  quiet  home  life.  She  writes : 

I  have  been  in  London  for  several  months  this 
year,  and  I  have  seen  a  good  deal  of  Matt,  con- 

5? 


THE    FAMILY   OF   FOX   HOW 

sidering  the  very  different  lives  we  lead.  I  used 
to  breakfast  with  him  sometimes,  and  then  his 
Poems  seemed  to  make  me  know  Matt  so  much 
better  than  I  had  ever  done  before.  Indeed  it 
was  almost  like  a  new  Introduction  to  him.  I 
do  not  think  those  Poems  could  be  read — quite 
independently  of  their  poetical  power — without 
leading  one  to  expect  a  great  deal  from  Matt; 
without  raising  I  mean  the  kind  of  expectation 
one  has  from  and  for  those  who  have,  hi  some 
way  or  other,  come  face  to  face  with  life  and 
asked  it,  hi  real  earnest,  what  it  means.  I  felt 
there  was  so  much  more  of  this  practical  ques- 
tioning in  Matt's  book  than  I  was  at  all  prepared 
for;  in  fact  that  it  showed  a  knowledge  of  life 
and  conflict  which  was  strangely  like  experience 
if  it  was  not  the  thing  itself;  and  this  with  all 
Matt's  great  power  I  should  not  have  looked 
for.  I  do  not  yet  know  the  book  well,  but 
I  think  that  "Mycerinus"  struck  me  most,  per- 
haps, as  illustrating  what  I  have  been  speak- 
ing of. 

And  again,  to  another  member  of  the  family: 

It  is  the  moral  strength,  or,  at  any  rate,  the 
moral  consciousness  which  struck  and  surprised 
me  so  much  in  the  poems.  I  could  have  been 
prepared  for  any  degree  of  poetical  power,  for 
there  being  a  great  deal  more  than  I  could  at  all 
appreciate;  but  there  is  something  altogether 
different  from  this,  something  which  such  a  man 
as  Clough  has,  for  instance,  which  I  did  not  expect 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

to  find  in  Matt;  but  it  is  there.  Of  course  when 
I  speak  of  his  Poems  I  only  speak  of  the  impres- 
sion received  from  those  I  understand.  Some 
are  perfect  riddles  to  me,  such  as  that  to  the 
Child  at  Douglas,  which  is  surely  more  poetical 
than  true. 

Strangely  like  experience!  The  words  are 
an  interesting  proof  of  the  difficulty  we  all 
have  in  seeing  with  accuracy  the  persons  and 
things  which  are  nearest  to  us.  The  as- 
tonishment of  the  sisters — for  the  same  feel- 
ing is  expressed  by  Mrs.  Forster — was  very 
natural.  In  these  early  days,  "Matt"  often 
figures  in  the  family  letters  as  the  worldling 
of  the  group — the  dear  one  who  is  making 
way  in  surroundings  quite  unknown  to  the 
Fox  How  circle,  where,  under  the  shadow  of 
the  mountains,  the  sisters,  idealists  all  of 
them,  looking  out  a  little  austerely,  for  all 
their  tenderness,  on  the  human  scene,  are 
watching  with  a  certain  anxiety  lest  Matt 
should  be  "spoiled."  As  Lord  Lansdowne's 
private  secretary,  very  much  liked  by  his 
chief,  he  goes  among  rich  and  important 
people,  and  finds  himself,  as  a  rule,  much 
cleverer  than  they;  above  all,  able  to  amuse 
them,  so  often  the  surest  road  to  social  and 
other  success.  Already  at  Oxford  "Matt" 
had  been  something  of  an  exquisite — or,  as 
Miss  Bronte  puts  it,  a  trifle  "foppish";  and 

60 


THE    FAMILY    OF   FOX   HOW 

(in  the  manuscript)  Fox  How  Magazine,  to 
which  all  the  nine  contributed,  and  in  which 
Matthew  Arnold's  boyish  poems  may  still 
be  read,  there  are  many  family  jests  leveled 
at  Matt's  high  standard  in  dress  and  de- 
portment. 

But  how  soon  the  nascent  dread  lest  their 
poet  should  be  somehow  separated  from  them 
by  the  " great  world"  passes  away  from 
mother  and  sisters — forever!  With  every 
year  of  his  life  Matthew  Arnold,  besides 
making  the  sunshine  of  his  own  married 
home,  became  a  more  attached,  a  more  de- 
voted son  and  brother.  The  two  volumes 
of  his  published  letters  are  there  to  show  it. 
I  will  only  quote  here  a  sentence  from  a  letter 
of  Mrs.  Arnold's,  written  in  1850,  a  year 
after  the  publication  of  the  Poems  by  A. 
She  and  her  eldest  daughter,  then  shortly 
to  become  William  Forster's  wife,  were  at 
the  time  in  London.  "  K  "  had  been  seriously 
ill,  and  the  marriage  had  been  postponed  for 
a  short  time. 

Matt  [says  Mrs.  Arnold]  has  been  with  us 
almost  every  day  since  we  came  up — now  so  long 
ago! — and  it  is  pleasant  indeed  to  see  his  dear 
face,  and  to  find  him  always  so  affectionate,  and 
so  unspoiled  by  his  being  so  much  sought  after 
in  a  kind  of  society  entirely  different  from  any- 
thing we  can  enter  into. 

61 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

But,  indeed,  the  time  saved,  day  after  day, 
for  an  invalid  sister,  by  a  run-after  young 
man  of  twenty-seven,  who  might  so  easily 
have  made  one  or  other  of  the  trifling  or 
selfish  excuses  we  are  all  so  ready  to  make, 
was  only  a  prophecy  of  those  many  "  name- 
less unremembered  acts"  of  simple  kindness 
which  filled  the  background  of  Matthew 
Arnold's  middle  and  later  life,  and  were  not 
revealed,  many  of  them,  even  to  his  own 
people,  till  after  his  death — kindness  to  a 
pupil-teacher,  an  unsuccessful  writer,  a  hard- 
worked  schoolmaster  or  schoolmistress,  a 
budding  poet,  a  school-boy.  It  was  not  pos- 
sible to  "spoil"  Matthew  Arnold.  Mere- 
dith's "Comic  Spirit"  in  him,  his  irrepressi- 
ble humor,  would  alone  have  saved  him  from 
it.  And  as  to  his  relation  to  "society,"  and 
the  great  ones  in  it,  no  one  more  frankly 
amused  himself — within  certain  very  definite 
limits — with  the  "cakes  and  ale"  of  life,  and 
no  one  held  more  lightly  to  them.  He  never 
denied — none  but  the  foolish  ever  do  deny — 
the  immense  personal  opportunities  and  ad- 
vantages of  an  aristocratic  class,  wherever  it 
exists.  He  was  quite  conscious — none  but 
those  without  imagination  can  fail  to  be 
conscious — of  the  glamour  of  long  descent 
and  great  affairs.  But  he  laughed  at  the 
"Barbarians,"  the  materialized  or  stupid 

62 


THE    FAMILY    OF   FOX    HOW 

holders  of  power  and  place,  and  their  "forti- 
fied posts "-—i.  e.,  the  country  houses — just 
as  he  laughed  at  the  Philistines  and  Mr. 
Bottles;  when  he  preached  a  sermon  in 
later  life,  it  was  on  Menander's  motto, 
"Choose  Equality";  and  he  and  Clough— 
the  Republican — were  not  really  far  apart. 
He  mocked  even  at  Clough,  indeed,  ad- 
dressing his  letters  to  him,  "Citizen 
Clough,  Oriel  Lyceum,  Oxford";  but  in 
the  midst  of  the  revolutionary  hubbub 
of  1848  he  pours  himself  out  to  Clough 
only  —  he  and  "Thyrsis,"  to  use  his  own 
expression  in  a  letter,  "agreeing  like  two 
lambs  in  a  world  of  wolves,"  and  in  his 
early  sonnet  (1848)  "To  a  Republican 
Friend"  (who  was  certainly  Clough)  he 
says: 

If  sadness  at  the  long  heart-wasting  show 

Wherein  earth's  great  ones  are  disquieted; 
If  thoughts,  not  idle,  while  before  me  flow 

The  armies  of  the  homeless  and  unfed — 
If  these  are  yours,  if  this  is  what  you  are, 
Then  I  am  yours,  and  what  you  feel,  I  share. 

Yet,  as  he  adds,  in  the  succeeding  sonnet,  he 
has  no  belief  in  sudden  radical  change,  nor  in 
any  earthly  millennium — 

63 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

Seeing  this  vale,  this  earth,  whereon  we  dream, 
Is  on  all  sides  o'ershadowed  by  the  high 
Uno'erleaped  mountains  of  necessity, 

Sparing  us  narrower  margin  than  we  dream. 

On  the  eagerness  with  which  Matthew 
Arnold  followed  the  revolutionary  spectacle 
of  1848,  an  unpublished  letter  written — pi- 
quantly  enough! — from  Lansdowne  House 
itself,  on  February  28th,  in  that  famous  year, 
to  my  father  in  New  Zealand,  throws  a  vivid 
light.  One  feels  the  artist  in  the  writer. 
First,  the  quiet  of  the  great  house  and  court- 
yard, the  flower-pricked  grass,  the  "still- 
faced  babies";  then  the  sudden  clash  of  the 
street-cries!  "Your  uncle's  description  of 
this  house,"  writes  the  present  Lord  Lans- 
downe, in  1910,  "  might  almost  have  been 
written  yesterday,  instead  of  in  1848.  Little 
is  changed,  Romulus  and  Remus  and  the 
she-wolf  are  still  on  the  top  of  the  book- 
case, and  the  clock  is  still  hard  by;  but 
the  picture  of  the  Jewish  Exiles  .  .  .  has 
been  given  to  a  local  School  of  Art  in 
Wiltshire!  The  green  lawn  remains,  but  I 
am  afraid  the  crocuses,  which  I  can  remem- 
ber as  a  child,  no  longer  come  up  through 
the  turf.  And  lastly  one  of  the  'still-faced 
babies'  [i.  e.,  Lord  Lansdowne  himself]  is 
still  often  to  be  seen  in  the  gravel  court! 

64 


THE    FAMILY    OF    FOX   HOW 

He  was  three  years  old  when  the  letter  was 
written." 
Here,  then,  is  the  letter: 

LANSDOWNE  HOUSE,  Feb.  8,  1848. 

MY  DEAREST  TOM, —  .  .  .  Here  I  sit,  opposite 
a  marble  group  of  Romulus  and  Remus  and  the 
wolf;  the  two  children  fighting  like  mad,  and 
the  limp-uddered  she-wolf  affectionately  snarling 
at  the  little  demons  struggling  on  her  back. 
Above  it  is  a  great  picture,  Rembrandt's  Jewish 
Exiles,  which  would  do  for  Consuelo  and  Albert 
resting  in  one  of  then1  wanderings,  worn  out 
upon  a  wild  stony  heath  sloping  to  the  Baltic — 
she  leaning  over  her  two  children  who  sleep  hi 
their  torn  rags  at  her  feet.  Behind  me  a  most 
musical  clock,  marking  now  24  Minutes  past 
1  P.M.  On  my  left  two  great  windows  looking 
out  on  the  court  in  front  of  the  house,  through 
one  of  which,  slightly  opened,  comes  hi  gushes 
the  soft  damp  breath,  with  a  tone  of  spring-life 
in  it,  which  the  close  of  an  English  February 
sometimes  brings — so  different  from  a  November 
mildness.  The  green  lawn  which  occupies  nearly 
half  the  court  is  studded  over  with  crocuses  of 
all  colors — growing  out  of  the  grass,  for  there 
are  no  flower-beds;  delightful  for  the  large  still- 
faced  white-robed  babies  whom  then"  nurses  carry 
up  and  down  on  the  gravel  court  where  it  skirts 
the  green.  And  from  the  square  and  the  neigh- 
boring streets,  through  the  open  door  whereat 
the  civil  porter  moves  to  and  fro,  come  the 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

sounds  of  vehicles  and  men,  in  all  gradations, 
some  from  near  and  some  from  far,  but  mellowed 
by  the  tune  they  reach  this  backstanding  lordly 
mansion. 

But  above  all  cries  comes  one  whereat  every 
stone  in  this  and  other  lordly  mansions  may 
totter  and  quake  for  fear: 

"Se  .  .  .  c  . . .  ond  Edition  of  the  Morning 
Herald — L  ...  a  ...  test  news  from  Paris: — 
arrival  of  the  King  of  the  French." 

I  have  gone  out  and  bought  the  said  portentous 
Herald,  and  send  it  herewith,  that  you  may  read 
and  know.  As  the  human  race  forever  stumbles 
up  its  great  steps,  so  it  is  now.  You  remember 
the  Reform  Banquets  [hi  Paris]  last  summer? 
— well! — the  diners  omitted  the  king's  health, 
and  abused  Guizot's  majority  as  corrupt  and 
servile:  the  majority  and  the  king  grew  excited; 
the  Government  forbade  the  Banquets  to  con- 
tinue. The  king  met  the  Chamber  with  the 
words  "passions  aveugles"  to  characterize  the 
dispositions  of  the  Banqueters:  and  Guizot 
grandly  declared  against  the  spirit  of  Revolution 
all  over  the  world.  His  practice  suited  his  words, 
or  seemed  to  suit  them,  for  both  in  Switzerland 
and  Italy,  the  French  Government  incurred  the 
charge  of  siding  against  the  Liberals.  Add  to 
this  the  corruption  cases  you  remember,  the 
Praslin  murder,  and  later  events,  which  power- 
fully stimulated  the  disgust  (moral  indignation 

66 


THE   FAMILY   OF   FOX   HOW 

that  People  does  not  feel!)  entertained  by  the 
lower  against  the  governing  class. 

Then  Thiers,  seeing  the  breeze  rising,  and 
hoping  to  use  it,  made  most  telling  speeches  hi 
the  debate  on  the  Address,  clearly  defining  the 
crisis  as  a  question  between  revolution  and 
counter-revolution,  and  declaring  enthusiastic- 
ally for  the  former.  Lamartine  and  others,  the 
sentimental  and  the  plain  honest,  were  very 
damaging  on  the  same  side.  The  Government 
were  harsh  —  abrupt  —  almost  scornful.  They 
would  not  yield — would  not  permit  banquets: 
would  give  no  Reform  till  they  chose.  Guizot 
spoke  (alone  in  the  Chamber,  I  think)  to  this 
effect.  With  decreasing  Majorities  the  Govern- 
ment carried  the  different  clauses  of  the  address, 
amidst  furious  scenes;  opposition  members  cry- 
ing that  they  were  worse  than  Polignac.  It  was 
resolved  to  hold  an  Opposition  banquet  in  Paris 
in  spite  of  the  Government,  last  Tuesday,  the 
22d.  In  the  week  between  the  close  of  the 
debate  and  this  day  there  was  a  profound,  un- 
easy excitement,  but  nothing  I  think  to  appall 
the  rulers.  They  had  the  fortifications;  all 
kinds  of  stores;  and  100,000  troops  of  the  line. 
To  be  quite  secure,  however,  they  determined  to 
take  a  formal  legal  objection  to  the  banquet 
at  the  doors;  but  not  to  prevent  the  procession 
thereto.  On  that  the  Opposition  published  a 
proclamation  inviting  the  National  Guard,  who 
sympathized,  to  form  part  of  the  procession  hi 
uniform.  Then  the  Government  forbade  the 

meeting  altogether — absolutely — and  the  Oppo- 
6  67 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

sition  resigned  themselves  to  try  the  case  in  a 
Court  of  Law. 

So  did  not  the  people! 

They  gathered  all  over  Paris:  the  National 
Guard,  whom  Ministers  did  not  trust,  were  not 
called  out:  the  Line  checked  and  dispersed  the 
mob  on  all  points.  But  next  day  the  mob  were 
there  again:  the  Ministers  in  a  constitutional 
fright  called  out  the  National  Guard:  a  body 
of  these  hard  by  the  Ope"ra  refused  to  clear  the 
street,  they  joined  the  people.  Troops  were 
brought  up:  the  Mob  and  the  National  Guard 
refused  to  give  them  passage  down  the  Rue  le 
Pelletier,  which  they  occupied:  after  a  moment's 
hesitation,  they  were  marched  on  along  the 
Boulevard. 

This  settled  the  matter!  Everywhere  the 
National  Guard  fraternized  with  the  people :  the 
troops  stood  indifferent.  The  King  dismissed 
the  Ministers:  he  sent  for  Mole";  a  shade  better: 
not  enough:  he  sent  for  Thiers — a  pause;  this 
was  several  shades  better — still  not  enough: 
meanwhile  the  crowd  continued,  and  attacks  on 
different  posts,  with  slight  bloodshed,  increased 
the  excitement:  finally  the  King  abdicated  hi 
favor  of  the  Count  of  Paris,  and  fled.  The  Count 
of  Paris  was  taken  by  his  mother  to  the  Chamber 
— the  people  broke  in;  too  late — not  enough: — 
a  republic — an  appeal  to  the  people.  The 
royal  family  escaped  to  all  parts,  Belgium,  Eu, 
England:  a  Provisional  Government  named. 

You  will  see  how  they  stand:  they  have 
adopted  the  last  measures  of  Revolution. — News 

68 


THE   FAMILY   OF   FOX   HOW 

has  just  come  that  the  National  Guard  have 
declared  against  a  Republic,  and  that  a  collision 
is  inevitable. 

If  possible  I  will  write  by  the  next  mail,  and 
send  you  a  later  paper  than  the  Herald  by  this 
mail. 

Your  truly  affectionate,  dearest  Tom, 

M.  ARNOLD. 

To  this  let  me  add  here  two  or  three  other 
letters  or  fragments,  all  unpublished,  which 
I  find  among  the  papers  from  which  I  have 
been  drawing,  ending,  for  the  present,  with 
the  jubilant  letter  describing  his  election  to 
the  Poetry  Professorship  at  Oxford,  in  1857. 
Here,  first  of  all,  is  an  amusing  reference, 
dated  1849,  to  Keble,  then  the  idol  of  every 
well-disposed  Anglican  household: 

I  dined  last  night  with  a  Mr.  Grove,1  a  cele- 
brated man  of  science:  his  wife  is  pretty  and 
agreeable,  but  not  on  a  first  interview.  The 
husband  and  I  agree  wonderfully  on  some  points. 
He  is  a  bad  sleeper,  and  hardly  ever  free  from 
headache;  he  equally  dislikes  and  disapproves 
of  modern  existence  and  the  state  of  excitement 
in  which  everybody  lives:  and  he  sighs  after  a 
paternal  despotism  and  the  calm  existence  of  a 
Russian  or  Asiatic.  He  showed  me  a  picture 
of  Faraday,  which  is  wonderfully  fine:  I  am 
almost  inclined  to  get  it:  it  has  a  curious  likeness 

1  Afterward  Sir  William  Grove,  F.R.S.,  author  of  the  famous 
essay  on  "The  Correlation  of  Physical  Force." 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

to  Keble,  only  with  a  calm,  earnest  look  unlike 
the  latter 's  Flibbertigibbet,  fanatical,  twinkling 
expression. 

Did  ever  anybody  apply  such  adjectives  to 
John  Keble  before!  Yet  if  any  one  will  look 
carefully  at  the  engraving  of  Keble  so  often 
seen  in  quiet  parsonages,  they  will  under- 
stand, I  think,  exactly  what  Matthew 
Arnold  meant. 

In  1850  great  changes  came  upon  the 
Arnold  family.  The  " Doctor's"  elder  three 
children — Jane,  Matthew,  and  my  father- 
married  in  that  year,  and  a  host  of  new  in- 
terests sprang  up  for  every  member  of  the 
Fox  How  circle.  I  find  in  a  letter  to  my 
father  from  Arthur  Stanley,  his  father's 
biographer,  and  his  own  Oxford  tutor,  the 
following  reference  to  "Matt's"  marriage, 
and  to  the  second  series  of  Poems — contain- 
ing "Sohrab  and  Rustum" — which  were  pub- 
lished in  1854.  "You  will  have  heard," 
writes  Stanley,  "of  the  great  success  of 
Matt's  poems.  He  is  in  good  heart  about 
them.  He  is  also — I  must  say  so,  though 
perhaps  I  have  no  right  to  say  so — greatly 
improved  by  his  marriage — retaining  all  the 
genius  and  nobleness  of  mind  which  you  re- 
member, with  all  the  lesser  faults  pruned  and 
softened  down."  Matt  himself  wrote  to 

70 


THE    FAMILY    OF    FOX    HOW 

give  news  of  his  wedding,  to  describe  the 
bride — Judge  Wightman's  daughter,  the  dear 
and  gracious  little  lady  whom  we  grand- 
children knew  and  loved  as  "Aunt  Fanny 
Lucy"— and  to  wish  my  father  joy  of  his 
own.  And  then  there  is  nothing  among  the 
waifs  and  strays  that  have  come  to  me  worth 
printing,  till  1855,  when  my  uncle  writes  to 
New  Zealand: 

I  hope  you  have  got  my  book  by  this  time. 
What  you  will  like  best,  I  think,  will  be  the 
"Scholar  Gipsy."  I  am  sure  that  old  Cumner 
and  Oxford  country  will  stir  a  chord  in  you. 
For  the  preface  I  doubt  if  you  will  care,  not  hav- 
ing much  before  your  eyes  the  sins  and  offenses 
at  which  it  is  directed:  the  first  being  that  we 
have  numbers  of  young  gentlemen  with  really 
wonderful  powers  of  perception  and  expression, 
but  to  whom  there  is  wholly  wanting  a  "bedeu- 
tendes  Individuum" — so  that  their  productions 
are  most  unedifying  and  unsatisfactory.  But 
this  is  a  long  story. 

As  to  Church  matters.  I  think  people  in 
general  concern  themselves  less  with  them  than 
they  did  when  you  left  England.  Certainly  re- 
ligion is  not,  to  all  appearance  at  least,  losing 
ground  here:  but  since  the  great  people  of  New- 
man's party  went  over,  the  disputes  among  the 
comparatively  unimportant  remains  of  them  do 
not  excite  much  interest.  I  am  going  to  hear 

Manning  at  the  Spanish  Chapel  next  Sunday. 

71 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

Newman  gives  himself  up  almost  entirely  to 
organizing  and  educating  the  Roman  Catholics, 
and  is  gone  off  greatly,  they  say,  as  a  preacher. 
God  bless  you,  my  dearest  Tom :  I  cannot  tell 
you  the  almost  painful  longing  I  sometimes  have 
to  see  you  once  more. 

The  following  year  the  brothers  met  again ; 
and  there  followed,  almost  immediately,  my 
uncle's  election  to  the  Poetry  Professorship 
at  Oxford.  He  writes,  in  answer  to  my 
father's  congratulations: 

HAMPTON,  May  15,  1857. 

MY  DEAR  TOM, — My  thoughts  have  often 
turned  to  you  during  my  canvass  for  the  Pro- 
fessorship— and  they  have  turned  to  you  more 
than  ever  during  the  last  few  days  which  I  have 
been  spending  at  Oxford.  You  alone  of  my 
brothers  are  associated  with  that  life  at  Oxford, 
the  freest  and  most  delightful  part,  perhaps,  of 
my  life,  when  with  you  and  Clough  and  Walrond 
I  shook  off  all  the  bonds  and  formalities  of  the 
place,  and  enjoyed  the  spring  of  life  and  that 
unforgotten  Oxfordshire  and  Berkshire  country. 
Do  you  remember  a  poem  of  mine  called  "The 
Scholar  Gipsy"?  It  was  meant  to  fix  the  re- 
membrance of  those  delightful  wanderings  of  ours 
in  the  Cumner  hills  before  they  were  quite 
effaced — and  as  such  Clough  and  Walrond  ac- 
cepted it,  and  it  has  had  much  success  at  Oxford, 

I  am  told,  as  was  perhaps  likely  from  its  couleur 

72 


THE    FAMILY   OF   FOX   HOW 

locale.  I  am  hardly  ever  at  Oxford  now,  but  the 
sentiment  of  the  place  is  overpowering  to  me 
when  I  have  leisure  to  feel  it,  and  can  shake 
off  the  interruptions  which  it  is  not  so  easy  to 
shake  off  now  as  it  was  when  we  were  young. 
But  on  Tuesday  afternoon  I  smuggled  myself 
away,  and  got  up  into  one  of  our  old  coombs 
among  the  Cumner  hills,  and  into  a  field  waving 
deep  with  cowslips  and  grasses,  and  gathered 
such  a  bunch  as  you  and  I  used  to  gather  in  the 
cowslip  field  on  Lutterworth  road  long  years  ago. 
You  dear  old  boy,  I  love  your  congratulations 
although  I  see  and  hear  so  little  of  you,  and,  alas! 
can  see  and  hear  but  so  little  of  you.  I  was  sup- 
ported by  people  of  all  opinions,  the  great  bond  of 
union  being,  I  believe,  the  affectionate  interest 
felt  in  papa's  memory.  I  think  it  probable  that 
I  shall  lecture  in  English:  there  is  no  direction 
whatever  in  the  Statute  as  to  the  language  in 
which  the  lectures  shall  be:  and  the  Latin  has  so 
died  out,  even  among  scholars,  that  it  seems  idle 
to  entomb  a  lecture  which,  in  English,  might 
be  stimulating  and  interesting. 

On  the  same  occasion,  writing  to  his 
mother,  the  new  Professor  gives  an  amusing 
account  of  the  election  day,  when  my  uncle 
and  aunt  came  up  to  town  from  Hampton, 
where  they  were  living,  in  order  to  get 
telegraphic  news  of  the  polling  from  friends 
at  Oxford.  " Christ  Church"--*,  e.,  the  High 
Church  party  in  Oxford — had  put  up  an 

73 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

opposition  candidate,  and  the  excitement  was 
great.  My  uncle  was  by  this  time  the  father 
of  three  small  boys,  Tom,  Trevenen — alias 
Budge— and  Richard— "  Diddy." 

We  went  first  to  the  telegraph  station  at 
Charing  Cross.  Then,  about  4,  we  got  a  mes- 
sage from  Walrond — "nothing  certain  is  known, 
but  it  is  rumored  that  you  are  ahead."  Then 
we  went  to  get  some  toys  for  the  children  in  the 
Lowther  Arcade,  and  could  scarcely  have  found 
a  more  genuine  distraction  than  in  selecting 
wagons  for  Tom  and  Trev,  with  horses  of 
precisely  the  same  color,  not  one  of  which 
should  have  a  hair  more  in  his  tail  than  the 
other — and  a  musical  cart  for  Diddy.  A  little 
after  five  we  went  back  to  the  telegraph  office, 
and  got  the  following  message — "Nothing  de- 
clared, but  you  are  said  to  be  quite  safe.  Go 
to  Eaton  Place."  ["Eaton  Place"  was  then  the 
house  of  Judge  Wightman,  Mrs.  Matthew  Ar- 
nold's father.]  To  Eaton  Place  we  went,  and 
then  a  little  after  6  o'clock  we  were  joined  by  the 
Judge  in  the  highest  state  of  joyful  excitement 
with  the  news  of  my  majority  of  85,  which  had 
been  telegraphed  to  him  from  Oxford  after  he 
had  started  and  had  been  given  to  him  at  Pad- 
dington  Station.  .  .  .  The  income  is  £130  a  year 
or  thereabouts:  the  duties  consist  as  far  as  I 
can  learn  in  assisting  to  look  over  the  prize 
compositions,  in  delivering  a  Latin  oration  in 

praise  of  founders  at  every  alternate  commemora- 

74 


THE    FAMILY    OF    FOX    HOW 

tion,  and  in  preparing  and  giving  three  Latin 
lectures  on  ancient  poetry  in  the  course  of  the 
year.  These  lectures  I  hope  to  give  in  English. 

The  italics  are  mine.  The  intention  ex- 
pressed here  and  in  the  letter  to  my  father 
was,  as  is  well  known,  carried  out,  and 
Matthew  Arnold's  Lectures  at  Oxford,  to- 
gether with  the  other  poetic  and  critical 
work  produced  by  him  during  the  years  of 
his  professorship,  became  so  great  a  force  in 
the  development  of  English  criticism  and 
English  taste,  that  the  lifelike  detail  of  this 
letter  acquires  a  kind  of  historical  value.  As 
a  child  of  fourteen  I  first  made  acquaintance 
with  Oxford  while  my  uncle  was  still  Pro- 
fessor. I  remember  well  some  of  his  lect- 
ures, the  crowded  lecture-hall,  the  manner 
and  personality  of  the  speaker,  and  my  own 
shy  pride  in  him — from  a  great  distance. 
For  I  was  a  self-conscious,  bookish  child,  and 
my  days  of  real  friendship  with  him  were  still 
far  ahead.  But  during  the  years  that  fol- 
lowed, the  ten  years  that  he  held  his  profes- 
sorship, what  a  spell  he  wielded  over  Oxford, 
and  literary  England  in  general!  Looking 
back,  one  sees  how  the  first  series  of  Essays 
in  Criticism,  the  Lectures  on  Celtic  Literature, 
or  On  Translating  Homer,  Culture,  and  Anar- 
chy and  the  rest,  were  all  the  time  working 

75 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

on  English  taste  and  feeling,  whether  through 
sympathy  or  antagonism;  so  that  after  those 
ten  years,  1857-1867,  the  intellectual  life  of 
the  country  had  absorbed,  for  good  and  all, 
an  influence,  and  a  stimulus,  which  had  set 
it  moving  on  new  paths  to  new  ends.  With 
these  thoughts  in  mind,  supplying  a  com- 
ment on  the  letter  which  few  people  could 
have  foreseen  in  1857,  let  me  quote  a  few 
more  sentences: 

Keble  voted  for  me  after  all.  He  told  the 
Coleridges  he  was  so  much  pleased  with  my 
letter  (to  the  electors)  that  he  could  not  refrain. 
...  I  had  support  from  all  sides.  Archdeacon 
Denison  voted  for  me,  also  Sir  John  Yarde 
Buller,  and  Henley,  of  the  high  Tory  party.  It 
was  an  immense  victory — some  200  more  voted 
than  have  ever,  it  is  said,  voted  in  a  Professorship 
election  before.  It  is  a  great  lesson  to  Christ 
Church,  which  was  rather  disposed  to  imagine  it 
could  carry  everything  by  its  great  numbers. 

Good-by,  my  dearest  mother.  ...  I  have 
just  been  up  to  see  the  three  dear  little  brown 
heads  on  their  pillows,  all  asleep.  .  .  .  My  af- 
fectionate thanks  to  Mrs.  Wordsworth  and  Mrs. 
Fletcher  for  their  kind  interest  in  my  success. 

It  is  pleasant  to  think  of  Wordsworth's 
widow,  in  her  "old  age  serene  and  bright," 
and  of  the  poet's  old  friend,  Mrs.  Fletcher, 

76 


THE    FAMILY    OF    FOX    HOW 

watching  and  rejoicing  in  the  first  triumphs 
of  the  younger  singer. 

So  the  ten  years  of  approach  and  attack- 
in  the  intellectual  sense — came  to  an  end, 
and  the  ten  central  years  of  mastery  and 
success  began.  Toward  the  end  of  that  time, 
as  a  girl  of  sixteen,  I  became  a  resident  in 
Oxford.  Up  to  then  Ruskin — the  Stones  of 
Venice  and  certain  chapters  in  Modern 
Painters — had  been  my  chief  intellectual  pas- 
sion in  a  childhood  and  first  youth  that  cut 
but  a  very  poor  figure,  as  I  look  back  upon 
them,  beside  the  "wonderful  children"  of 
this  generation!  But  it  must  have  been 
about  1868  that  I  first  read  Essays  in 
Criticism.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the 
book  set  for  me  the  currents  of  life;  its 
effect  heightened,  no  doubt,  by  the  sense  of 
kinship.  Above  all  it  determined  in  me,  as 
in  many  others,  an  enduring  love  of  France 
and  of  French  literature,  which  played  the 
part  of  schoolmaster  to  a  crude  youth.  I 
owe  this  to  my  uncle,  and  it  was  a  priceless 
boon.  If  he  had  only  lived  a  little  longer — 
if  he  had  not  died  so  soon  after  I  had  really 
begun  to  know  him — how  many  debts  to 
him  would  have  been  confessed,  how  many 
things  said,  which,  after  all,  were  never  said! 


CHAPTER  IV 

OTHER   CHILDREN   OF   FOX   HOW 

I  HAVE  now  to  sketch  some  other  figures 
*  in  the  Fox  How  circle,  together  with  a 
few  of  the  intimate  friends  who  mingled  with 
it  frequently,  and  very  soon  became  names 
of  power  to  the  Tasmanian  child  also. 

Let  me  take  first  Doctor  Arnold's  third 
son,  "Uncle  Willy" — my  father's  junior  by 
some  four  years.  William  Delafield  Arnold 
is  secure  of  long  remembrance,  one  would 
fain  think,  if  only  as  the  subject  of  Matthew 
Arnold's  two  memorial  poems — "A  Southern 
Night"  and  "Stanzas  from  Carnac."  But 
in  truth  he  had  many  and  strong  claims  of 
his  own.  His  youth  was  marked  by  that 
"  restlessness,"  which  is  so  often  spoken  of 
in  the  family  letters  as  a  family  quality  and 
failing.  My  father's  "restlessness"  made 
him  throw  up  a  secure  niche  in  English  life, 
for  the  New  Zealand  adventure.  The  same 
temperament  in  Mary  Twining,  the  young 
widow  of  twenty-two,  took  her  to  London, 
away  from  the  quiet  of  the  Ambleside  valley, 
and  made  her  an  ardent  follower  of  Maurice, 
Kingsley,  and  Carlyle.  And  in  Willy,  the 

78 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

third  son,  it  showed  itself  first  in  a  revolt 
against  Oxford,  while  he  was  still  at  Christ 
Church,  leading  to  his  going  out  to  India 
and  joining  the  Indian  Army,  at  the  age  of 
twenty,  only  to  find  the  life  of  an  Indian 
subaltern  all  but  intolerable,  and  to  plunge 
for  a  time  at  least  into  fresh  schemes  of 
change. 

Among  the  early  photographs  at  Fox  How 
there  is  a  particularly  fine  daguerreotype  of 
a  young  officer  in  uniform,  almost  a  boy, 
slim  and  well  proportioned,  with  piled  curly 
hair,  and  blue  eyes,  which  in  the  late  'fifties 
I  knew  as  " Uncle  Willy";  and  there  were 
other  photographs  on  glass  of  the  same  young 
man,  where  this  handsome  face  appeared 
again,  grown  older — much  older — the  boyish 
look  replaced  by  an  aspect  of  rather  grave 
dignity.  In  the  later  pictures  he  was  grouped 
with  children,  whom  I  knew  as  my  Indian 
cousins.  But  him,  in  the  flesh,  I  had  never 
seen.  He  was  dead.  His  wife  was  dead. 
On  the  landing  bookcase  of  Fox  How  there 
was,  however,  a  book  in  two  blue  volumes, 
which  I  soon  realized  as  .a  "novel," 
called  Oakfield,  which  had  been  written  by 
the  handsome  young  soldier  in  the  daguerreo- 
type. I  tried  to  read  it,  but  found  it  was 
about  things  and  persons  in  which  I  could 
then  take  no  interest.  But  its  author  re- 

79 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

mained  to  me  a  mysteriously  attractive 
figure;  and  when  the  time  came  for  me  to 
read  my  Uncle  Matthew's  poems,  "A  South- 
ern Night,"  describing  the  death  at  Gibraltar 
of  this  soldier  uncle,  became  a  great  favorite 
with  me.  I  could  see  it  all  as  Matthew 
Arnold  described  it — the  steamer  approach- 
ing Gibraltar,  the  landing,  and  the  pale  in- 
valid with  the  signs  on  him  of  that  strange 
thing  called  "  death,"  which  to  a  child  that 
"  feels  its  life  in  every  limb"  has  no  real 
meaning,  though  the  talk  of  it  may  lead 
vaguely  to  tears,  as  that  poem  often  did 
with  me. 

Later  on,  of  course,  I  read  Oakfield,  and 
learned  to  take  a  more  informed  pride  in  the 
writer  of  it.  But  it  was  not  until  a  number 
of  letters  written  from  India  by  William 
Arnold  to  my  father  in  New  Zealand  between 
1848  and  1855,  with  a  few  later  ones,  came 
into  my  possession,  at  my  father's  death, 
that  I  really  seemed  to  know  this  dear  van- 
ished kinsman,  though  his  orphaned  children 
had  always  been  my  friends. 

The  letters  of  1848  and  1849  read  like  notes 
for  Oakfield.  They  were  written  in  bitter- 
ness of  soul  by  a  very  young  man,  with  high 
hopes  and  ideals,  fresh  from  the  surround- 
ings of  Oxford  and  Rugby,  from  the  training 
of  the  Schoolhouse  and  Fox  How,  and 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

plunged  suddenly  into  a  society  of  boys— 
the  subalterns  of  the  Bengal  Native  Infantry 
—living  for  the  most  part  in  idleness,  often 
a  vicious  idleness,  without  any  restraining 
public  opinion,  and  practically  unshepherded, 
amid  the  temptations  of  the  Indian  climate 
and  life.  They  show  that  the  novel  is,  in- 
deed, as  was  always  supposed,  largely  auto- 
biographical, and  the  references  in  them  to 
the  struggle  with  the  Indian  climate  point 
sadly  forward  to  the  writer's  own  fate,  ten 
years  later,  when,  like  the  hero  of  his  novel, 
Edward  Oakfield,  he  fell  a  victim  to  Indian 
heat  and  Indian  work.  The  novel  was  pub- 
lished in  1853,  while  its  author  was  at  home 
on  a  long  sick  leave,  and  is  still  remembered 
for  the  anger  and  scandal  it  provoked  in 
India,  and  the  reforms  to  which,  no  doubt, 
after  the  Mutiny,  it  was  one  of  the  contribut- 
ing impulses.  It  is,  indeed,  full  of  interest 
for  any  student  of  the  development  of  Anglo- 
Indian  life  and  society;  even  when  one  re- 
members how,  soon  after  it  was  published, 
the  great  storm  of  the  Mutiny  came  rushing 
over  the  society  it  describes,  changing  and 
uprooting  everywhere.  As  fiction,  it  suf- 
fers from  the  Rugby  "earnestness"  which 
overmasters  in  it  any  purely  artistic  impulse, 
while  infusing  a  certain  fire  and  unity  of  its 
own.  But  various  incidents  in  the  story — 

81 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

the  quarrel  at  the  mess-table,  the  horse- 
whipping, the  court  martial,  the  death  of 
Vernon,  and  the  meeting  between  Oakfield 
and  Stafford,  the  villain  of  the  piece,  after 
Chilianwallah — are  told  with  force,  and  might 
have  led  on,  had  the  writer  lived,  to  some- 
thing more  detached  and  mature  in  the  way 
of  novel-writing. 

But  there  were  few  years  left  to  him, 
"poor  gallant  boy!" — to  quote  the  phrase 
of  his  poet  brother;  and  within  them  he 
was  to  find  his  happiness  and  his  opportunity 
in  love  and  in  public  service,  not  in  literature. 

Nothing  could  be  more  pathetic  than  the 
isolation  and  revolt  of  the  early  letters.  The 
boy  Ensign  is  desperately  homesick,  pining 
for  Fox  How,  for  his  mother  and  sisters,  for 
the  Oxford  he  had  so  easily  renounced,  for  the 
brothers  parted  from  him  by  such  leagues 
of  land  and  sea. 

The  fact  that  one  learns  first  in  India  [he  says, 
bitterly]  is  the  profound  ignorance  which  exists 
in  England  about  it.  You  know  how  one  hears 
it  spoken  of  always  as  a  magnificent  field  for 
exertion,  and  this  is  true  enough  in  one  way,  for 
if  a  man  does  emerge  at  all,  he  emerges  the  more 
by  contrast — he  is  a  triton  among  minnows. 
But  I  think  the  responsibility  of  those  who  keep 
sending  out  here  young  fellows  of  sixteen  and 
seventeen  fresh  from  a  private  school  or  Addis- 

82 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

combe  is  quite  awful.  The  stream  is  so  strong, 
the  society  is  so  utterly  worldly  and  mercenary 
in  its  best  phase,  so  utterly  and  inconceivably 
low  and  profligate  in  its  worst,  that  it  is  not 
strange  that  at  so  early  an  age,  eight  out  of  ten 
sink  beneath  it.  ...  One  soon  observes  here 
how  seldom  one  meets  a  happy  man. 

I  came  out  here  with  three  great  advantages  [he 
adds].  First,  being  twenty  instead  of  seventeen; 
secondly  not  having  been  at  Addiscombe;  third, 
having  been  at  Rugby  and  Christ  Church.  This 
gives  me  a  sort  of  position — but  still  I  know 
the  danger  is  awful — for  constitutionally  I  believe 
I  am  as  little  able  to  stand  the  peculiar  trials  of 
Indian  life  as  anybody. 

And  he  goes  on  to  say  that  if  ever  he  feels 
himself  in  peril  of  sinking  to  the  level  of  what 
he  loathes — "I  will  go  at  once."  By  coming 
out  to  India  he  had  bound  himself  to  one 
thing  only — "to  earn  my  own  bread."  But 
he  is  not  bound  to  earn  it  "as  a  gentleman." 
The  day  may  come — 

when  I  shall  ask  for  a  place  on  your  farm,  and 
if  you  ask  how  I  am  to  get  there,  you,  Tom,  are 
not  the  person  to  deny  that  a  man  who  is  in 
earnest  and  capable  of  forming  a  resolution  can 
do  more  difficult  things  than  getting  from  India 
to  New  Zealand! 

And  he  winds  up  with  yearning  affection 
toward  the  elder  brother  so  far  away. 

7  83 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

I  think  of  you  very  often — our  excursion  to 
Keswick  and  Greta  Hall,  our  walk  over  Hardknot 
and  Wrynose,  our  bathes  in  the  old  Allen  Bank 
bathing-place  [Grasmere],  our  parting  in  the  cab 
at  the  corner  of  Mount  St.  One  of  my  pleasant- 
est  but  most  difficult  problems  is  when  and  where 
we  shall  meet  again. 

In  another  letter,  written  a  year  later,  the 
tone  is  still  despondent.  "It  is  no  affecta- 
tion to  say  that  I  feel  my  life,  in  one  way, 
cannot  now  be  a  happy  one."  He  feels  it  his 
duty  for  the  present  to  "lie  still,"  as  Keble 
says,  to  think,  it  may  be  to  suffer.  "But  in 
my  castle-buildings  I  often  dream  of  coming 
to  you."  He  appreciates,  more  fully  than 
ever  before,  Tom's  motives  in  going  to  New 
Zealand — the  desire  that  may  move  a  man 
to  live  his  own  life  in  a  new  and  freer  world. 
"But  when  I  am  asked,  as  I  often  am,  why 
you  went,  I  always  grin  and  let  people  answer 
themselves;  for  I  could  not  hope  to  explain 
without  preaching  a  sermon.  An  act  of 
faith  and  conviction  cannot  be  understood 
by  the  light  of  worldly  motives  and  interests; 
and  to  blow  out  this  light,  and  bring  the  true 
one,  is  not  the  work  of  a  young  man  with  his 
own  darkness  to  struggle  through;  so  I  grin 
as  aforesaid."  "God  is  teaching  us,"  he 
adds — i.  e.,  the  different  members  of  the  family 
— "by  separation,  absence,  and  suffering." 

84 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

And  he  winds  up — "Good-by.  I  never  like 
finishing  a  letter  to  you — it  seems  like  letting 
you  fall  back  again  to  such  infinite  distance. 
And  you  are  often  very  near  me,  and  the 
thought  of  you  is  often  cheery  and  helpful 
to  me  in  my  own  conflict."  Even  up  to 
January,  1850,  he  is  still  thinking  of  New 
Zealand,  and  signing  himself,  "ever,  dear 
Tom,  whether  I  am  destined  to  see  you  soon, 
or  never  again  in  this  world — Your  most 
truly  affectionate  brother." 

Alack!  the  brothers  never  did  meet  again, 
in  this  world  which  both  took  so  hardly. 
But  for  Willy  a  transformation  scene  was 
near.  After  two  years  in  India,  his  gift  and 
his  character  had  made  their  mark.  He  had 
not  only  been  dreaming  of  New  Zealand; 
besides  his  daily  routine,  he  had  been  work- 
ing hard  at  Indian  languages  and  history. 
The  Lawrences,  both  John  and  Henry,  had 
found  him  out,  and  realized  his  quality.  It 
was  at  Sir  Henry  Lawrence's  house  in  the 
spring  of  1850  that  he  met  Miss  Fanny 
Hodgson,  daughter  of  the  distinguished  sol- 
dier and  explorer,  General  Hodgson,  dis- 
coverer of  the  sources  of  the  Ganges,  and 
at  that  time  the  Indian  Surveyor-General. 
The  soldier  of  twenty-three  fell  instantly  in 
love,  and  tumult  and  despondency  melted 
away.  The  next  letter  to  New  Zealand  is 

85 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

pitched  in  quite  another  key.  He  still  judges 
Indian  life  and  Indian  government  with  a 
very  critical  eye.  "The  Alpha  and  Omega 
of  the  whole  evil  in  Indian  Society"  is  "the 
regarding  India  as  a  rupee-mine,  instead  of 
a  Colony,  and  ourselves  as  Fortune-hunters 
and  Pension-earners  rather  than  as  emigrants 
and  missionaries."  And  outside  his  domestic 
life  his  prospects  are  still  uncertain.  But 
with  every  mail  one  can  see  the  strained 
spirit  relaxing,  yielding  to  the  spell  of  love 
and  to  the  honorable  interests  of  an  opening 
life. 

"To-day,  my  Thomas  [October  2,  18501, 
I  sit,  a  married  man  in  the  Bengal  army, 
writing  to  a  brother,  it  may  be  a  married 
man,  in  Van  Diemen's  Land."  (Rumors  of 
Tom's  courtship  of  Julia  Sorell  had  evidently 
just  reached  him.)  He  goes  on  to  describe 
his  married  home  at  Hoshyarpore,  and  his 
work  at  Indian  languages.  He  has  been 
reading  Carlyle's  Cromwell,  and  marveling 
at  the  "rapid  rush  of  thought  which  seems 
more  and  more  to  be  engrossing  people  in 
England!"  "In  India  you  will  easily  be- 
lieve that  the  torpor  is  still  unbroken." 
(The  Mutiny  was  only  seven  short  years 
ahead!)  And  he  is  still  conscious  of  the 
"many  weights  which  do  beset  and  embitter 
a  man's  life  in  India."  But  a  new  stay 

86 


within,  the  reconciliation  that  love  brings 
about  between  a  man  and  the  world,  upholds 
him. 

'"To  draw  homeward  to  the  general  life/ 
which  you,  and  dear  Matt  himself,  and  I, 
and  all  of  us,  are — or  at  least  may  be — living, 
independent  of  all  the  accidents  of  time  and 
circumstance — this  is  a  great  alleviation." 
The  "fundamentals"  are  safe.  He  dwells 
happily  on  the  word — "a  good  word,  in 
which  you  and  I,  so  separated,  as  far  as 
accidents  go,  it  may  be  for  all  time,  can  find 
great  comfort,  speaking  as  it  does  of  Eter- 
nity." One  sees  what  is  in  his  mind — the 
brother's  "little  book  of  poems"  published 
a  year  before: 

Yet  they,  believe  me,  who  await 
No  gifts  from  chance,  have  conquered  fate, 
They,  winning  room  to  see  and  hear, 
And  to  men's  business  not  too  near 
Though  clouds  of  individual  strife 
Draw  homeward  to  the  general  life. 

To  the  wise,  foolish;   to  the  world 
Weak; — yet  not  weak,  I  might  reply, 
Not  foolish,  Fausta,  in  His  eye, 
To  whom  each  moment  in  its  race, 
Crowd  as  we  will  its  neutral  space, 
Is  but  a  quiet  watershed 
Whence,  equally,  the  seas  of  life  and  death  are  fed. 

87 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

Six  months  later  the  younger  brother  has 
heard  "as  a  positive  fact"  of  Tom's  marriage, 
and  writes,  with  affectionate  " chaff": 

I  wonder  whether  it  has  changed  you  much? — 
not  made  a  Tory  of  you,  I'll  undertake  to  say! 
But  it  is  wonderfully  sobering.  After  all,  Master 
Tom,  it  is  not  the  very  exact  finale  which  we 
should  have  expected  to  your  Republicanism  of 
the  last  three  or  four  years,  to  find  you  a  re- 
spectable married  man,  holding  a  permanent 
appointment! 

Matt's  marriage,  too,  stands  pre-eminent 
among  the  items  of  family  news.  What 
blind  judges,  sometimes,  the  most  attached 
brothers  are  of  each  other! 

I  hear  too  by  this  mail  of  Matt's  engagement, 
which  suggests  many  thoughts.  I  own  that 
Matt  is  one  of  the  very  last  men  in  the  world 
whom  I  can  fancy  happily  married — or  rather 
happy  in  matrimony.  But  I  dare  say  I  reckon 
without  my  host,  for  there  was  such  a  "longum 
intervallum"  between  dear  old  Matt  and  me, 
that  even  that  last  month  hi  town,  when  I  saw 
so  much  of  him,  though  there  was  the  most  entire 
absence  of  elder-brotherism  on  his  part,  and  only 
the  most  kind  and  thoughtful  affection,  for  which 
I  shall  always  feel  grateful,  yet  our  intercourse 
was  that  of  man  and  boy;  and  though  the  dif- 
ference of  years  was  not  so  formidable  as  between 

88 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

" Matthew"  and  Wordsworth,  yet  we  were  less 
than  they  a  "pair  of  Friends,"  though  a  pair  of 
very  loving  brothers. 

But  even  in  this  gay  and  charming  letter 
one  begins  to  see  the  shadows  cast  by  the 
doom  to  come.  The  young  wife  has  gone  to 
Simla,  having  been  " delicate"  for  some  time. 
The  young  husband  stays  behind,  fighting 
the  heat. 

The  hot  weather,  old  boy,  is  coming  on  like  a 
tiger.  It  is  getting  on  for  ten  at  night;  but  we 
sit  with  windows  all  wide  open,  the  punkah 
going,  the  thinnest  conceivable  garments,  and 
yet  we  sweat,  my  brother,  very  profusely.  .  .  . 
To-morrow  I  shall  be  up  at  gun-fire,  about  half- 
past  four  A.M.  and  drive  down  to  the  civil  station, 
about  three  miles  off,  to  see  a  friend,  an  officer 
of  our  own  corps  .  .  .  who  is  sick,  return,  take  my 
Bearer's  daily  account,  write  a  letter  or  so,  and 
lie  down  with  Don  Quixote  under  a  punkah,  go 
to  sleep  the  first  chapter  that  Sancho  lets  me, 
and  sleep  till  ten,  get  up,  bathe,  re-dress  and 
breakfast;  do  my  daily  business,  such  as  it  is — 
hard  work,  believe  me,  in  a  hot  sleep-inducing, 
intestine-withering  climate,  till  sunset,  when 
doors  and  windows  are  thrown  open  .  .  .  and 
mortals  go  out  to  "eat  the  air,"  as  the  natives  say. 

The  climate,  indeed,  had  already  begun  its 
deadly  attack  upon  an  organism  as  fine  and 

89 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

sensitive  as  any  of  the  myriad  victims  which 
the  secret  forces  of  India's  sun  and  soil  have 
exacted  from  her  European  invaders.  In 
1853,  William  Delafield  Arnold  came  home 
invalided,  with  his  wife  and  his  elder  two 
children.  The  third,  Oakeley  (the  future 
War  Minister  in  Mr.  Balfour's  Government), 
was  born  in  England  in  1855.  There  were 
projects  of  giving  up  India  and  settling  at 
home.  The  young  soldier  whose  literary 
gift,  always  conspicuous  among  the  nine  in 
the  old  childish  Fox  How  days,  and  already 
shown  in  Oakfield,  was  becoming  more  and 
more  marked,  was  at  this  time  a  frequent 
contributor  to  the  Times,  the  Economist,  and 
Fraser,  and  was  presently  offered  the  editor- 
ship of  the  Economist.  But  just  as  he  was 
about  to  accept  it,  came  a  flattering  offer 
from  India,  no  doubt  through  the  influence 
of  Sir  John  Lawrence,  of  the  Directorship  of 
Public  Instruction  in  the  Punjaub.  He 
thought  himself  bound  to  accept  it,  and  with 
his  wife  and  two  children  went  out  again  at 
the  end  of  1855.  His  business  was  to  or- 
ganize the  whole  of  native  education  injthe 
Punjaub,  and  he  did  it  so  well  during  the 
short  time  that  remained  to  him  before  the 
Mutiny  broke  out,  that  during  all  that  time 
of  terror,  education  in  the  Punjaub  was  never 
interrupted,  the  attendances  at  the  schools 

90 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

never  dropped,  and  the  young  Director  went 
about  his  work,  not  knowing  often,  indeed, 
whether  the  whole  province  might  not  be 
aflame  within  twenty-four  hours,  and  its 
Anglo-Indian  administration  wiped  out,  but 
none  the  less  undaunted  and  serene. 

To  this  day,  three  portrait  medals  in  gold 
and  silver  are  given  every  year  to  the  best 
pupils  in  the  schools  of  the  Punjaub,  the 
product  of  a  fund  raised  immediately  after 
his  death  by  William  Arnold's  fellow-workers 
there,  in  order  to  commemorate  his  short 
heroic  course  in  that  far  land,  and  to  pre- 
serve, if  they  could,  some  record  of  that 
"sweet  stateliness"  of  aspect,  to  use  the  ex- 
pression of  one  who  loved  him,  which  "had 
so  fascinated  his  friends." 

The  Mutiny  passed.  Sir  John  Lawrence 
paid  public  and  flattering  tribute  to  the  young 
official  who  had  so  amply  justified  a  great 
man's  choice.  And  before  the  storm  had  act- 
ually died  away,  within  a  fortnight  of  the  fall 
of  Delhi,  while  it  was  not  yet  certain  that  the 
troops  on  their  way  would  arrive  in  time  to 
prevent  further  mischief,  my  uncle,  writing  to 
my  father  of  the  awful  days  of  suspense  from 
the  14th  to  the  30th  of  September,  says : 

A  more  afflicted  country  than  this  has  been 
since  I  returned  to  it  in  November,  1855 — 

91 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

afflicted  by  Dearth — Deluge — Pestilence — far 
worse  than  war,  it  would  be  hard  to  imagine. 
In  the  midst  of  it  all,  the  happiness  of  our  domestic 
life  has  been  almost  perfect. 

With  that  touching  sentence  the  letters 
to  my  father,  so  far,  at  least,  as  I  possess 
them,  come  to  an  end.  Alas!  In  the  follow- 
ing year  the  gentle  wife  and  mother,  worn 
out  by  India,  died  at  a  hill-station  in  the 
Himalayas,  and  a  few  months  later  her 
husband,  ill  and  heartbroken,  sent  his 
motherless  children  home  by  long  sea,  and 
followed  himself  by  the  overland  route.  Too 
late!  He  was  taken  ill  in  Egypt,  struggled 
on  to  Malta,  and  was  put  ashore  at  Gibraltar 
to  die.  From  Cairo  he  had  written  to  the 
beloved  mother  who  was  waiting  for  him  in 
that  mountain  home  he  so  longed  to  reach, 
that  he  hoped  to  be  able  to  travel  in  a 
fortnight. 

But  do  not  trust  to  this.  .  .  .  Do  not  in  fact 
expect  me  till  you  hear  that  I  am  hi  London. 
I  much  fear  that  it  may  be  long  before  I  see  dear, 
dear  Fox  How.  In  London  I  must  have  advice, 
and  I  feel  sure  I  shall  be  ordered  to  the  South  of 
England  till  the  hot  weather  is  well  advanced. 
I  must  wait  too  in  London  for  the  darling 
children.  But  once  in  London,  I  cannot  but 
think  my  dearest  mother  will  manage  to  see  me, 

92 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

and  I  have  even  had  visions  of  your  making  one 
of  your  spring  tours,  and  going  with  me  to 
Torquay  or  wherever  I  may  go.  .  .  .  Plans — 
plans — plans!  They  will  keep. 

And  a  few  days  later: 

As  I  said  before,  do  not  expect  me  in  England 
till  you  hear  I  am  there.     Perhaps  I  was  too 
eager   to    get  home.    Assuredly   I    have  been 
checked,  and  I  feel  as  if  there  were  much  trouble 
between  me  and  home  yet.  ...  I  see  in  the 
papers  the  death  of  dear  Mrs.  Wordsworth.  .  .  . 
Ever  my  beloved  mother  .  .  . 
Your  very  loving  son, 

W.  D.  ARNOLD. 

He  started  for  England,  but  at  Gibraltar, 
a  dying  man,  was  carried  ashore.  His  younger 
brother,  sent  out  from  England  in  post 
haste,  missed  him  by  ill  chance  at  Alexandria 
and  Malta,  and  arrived  too  late.  He  was 
buried  under  the  shelter  of  the  Rock  of 
Spain  and  the  British  flag.  His  intimate 
friend,  Meredith  Townsend,  the  joint  editor 
and  creator  of  the  Spectator,  wrote  to  the 
Times  shortly  after  his  death: 

William  Arnold  did  not  live  long  enough  (he 
was  thirty-one)  to  gain  his  true  place  in  the 
world,  but  he  had  time  enough  given  him  to 
make  himself  of  importance  to  a  Government 

93 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

like  that  of  Lord  Dalhousie,  to  mold  the  educa- 
tion of  a  great  province,  and  to  win  the  enduring 
love  of  all  with  whom  he  ever  came  in  contact. 

It  was  left,  however,  for  his  poet-brother 
to  build  upon  his  early  grave  "the  living 
record  of  his  memory."  A  month  after 
"Willy's"  death,  "Matt"  was  wandering 
where — 

beneath  me,  bright  and  wide 
Lay  the  low  coast  of  Brittany — 

with  the  thought  of  "Willy"  in  his  mind,  as 
he  turns  to  the  sea  that  will  never  now  bring 
the  wanderer  home. 

O,  could  he  once  have  reached  the  air 
Freshened  by  plunging  tides,  by  showers! 

Have  felt  this  breath  he  loved,  of  fair 
Cool  northern  fields,  and  grain,  and  flowers. 

He  longed  for  it — pressed  on! — In  vain! 

At  the  Straits  failed  that  spirit  brave, 
The  south  was  parent  of  his  pain, 

The  south  is  mistress  of  his  grave. 

Or  again,  in  "A  Southern  Night" — where 
he  muses  on  the  "two  jaded  English,"  man 
and  wife,  who  lie,  one  under  the  Himalayas, 
the  other  beside  "the  soft  Mediterranean." 
And  his  first  thought  is  that  for  the  "spent 

94 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

ones  of  a  work-day  age,"  such  graves  are 
out  of  keeping. 

In  cities  should  we  English  lie 

Where  cries  are  rising  ever  new, 
And  men's  incessant  stream  goes  by! — 

Not  by  those  hoary  Indian  hills, 
Not  by  this  gracious  Midland  sea 

Whose  floor  to-night  sweet  moonshine  fills 
Should  our  graves  be! 

Some  Eastern  sage  pursuing  "the  pure  goal 
of  being"  —"He  by  those  Indian  mountains 
old,  might  well  repose."     Crusader,  trouba- 
dour, or  maiden  dying  for  love- 
Such  by  these  waters  of  romance 
'Twas  meet  to  lay! 

And  then  he  turns  upon  himself.  For 
what  is  beauty,  what  wisdom,  what  romance 
if  not  the  tender  goodness  of  women,  if  not 
the  high  soul  of  youth? 

Mild  o'er  her  grave,  ye  mountains,  shine! 

Gently  by  his,  ye  waters,  glide! 
To  that  in  you  which  is  divine 

They  were  allied. 

Only  a  few  days  after  their  father's  death, 
the  four  orphan  children  of  the  William 
Arnolds  arrived  at  Fox  How.  They  were 
immediately  adopted  as  their  own  by  William 

95 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

and  Jane  Forster,  who  had  no  children;  and 
later  they  added  the  name  of  Forster  to  that 
of  Arnold.  At  that  moment  I  was  at  school 
at  Ambleside,  and  I  remember  well  my  first 
meeting  with  the  Indian  children,  and  how 
I  wondered  at  their  fair  skins  and  golden 
hair  and  frail,  ethereal  looks. 

By  this  time  Fox  How  was  in  truth  a 
second  home  to  me.  But  I  have  still  to 
complete  the  tale  of  those  who  made  it  so. 
Edward  Penrose,  the  Doctor's  fourth  son, 
who  died  in  1878,  on  the  threshold  of  fifty, 
was  a  handsome,  bearded  man  of  winning 
presence  and  of  many  friends.  He  was  at 
Balliol,  then  a  Fellow  of  All  Souls,  and  in 
Orders.  But  he  first  found  his  real  vocation 
as  an  Inspector  of  Schools  in  Devon  and 
Cornwall,  and  for  eighteen  years,  from  1860 
to  1878,  through  the  great  changes  in  ele- 
mentary education  produced  by  his  brother- 
in-law's  Education  Act,  he  was  the  ever- 
welcome  friend  of  teachers  and  children  all 
over  the  wide  and  often  remote  districts  of 
the  West  country  which  his  work  covered. 
He  had  not  the  gifts  of  his  elder  brothers — 
neither  the  genius  of  Matthew  nor  the  restless 
energy  and  initiative  of  William  Delafield, 
nor  the  scholarly  and  researching  tastes  of 
my  father;  and  his  later  life  was  always  a 
struggle  against  ill-health.  But  he  had  Mat- 

96 


OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

thew's  kindness,  and  Matthew's  humor — the 
"chaff"  between  the  two  brothers  was  end- 
less!— and  a  large  allowance  of  William's 
charm.  His  unconscious  talk  in  his  last  ill- 
ness was  often  of  children.  He  seemed  to  see 
them  before  him  in  the  country  school-rooms, 
where  his  coming — the  coming  of  "the  tall 
gentleman  with  the  kind  blue  eyes,"  as  an 
eye-witness  describes  him — was  a  festa,  ex- 
cellent official  though  he  was.  He  carried 
enthusiasm  into  the  cause  of  popular  educa- 
tion, and  that  is  not  a  very  common  en- 
thusiasm in  this  country  of  ours.  Yet  the 
cause  is  nothing  more  nor  less  than  the  cause 
of  the  international  intelligence,  and  its  sharp- 
ening for  the  national  tasks.  But  education 
has  always  been  the  Cinderella  of  politics;  this 
nation  apparently  does  not  love  to  be  taught ! 
Those  who  grapple  with  its  stubbornness  in 
this  field  can  never  expect  the  ready  palm 
that  falls  to  the  workers  in  a  dozen  other 
fields.  But  in  the  seed  sown,  and  the  human 
duty  done,  they  find  their  reward. 

"Aunt  Mary,"  Arnold's  second  daughter, 
I  have  already  spoken  of.  When  my  father 
and  mother  reached  England  from  Tasmania, 
she  had  just  married  again,  a  Leicestershire 
clergyman,  with  a  house  and  small  estate 
near  Loughborough.  Her  home  —  Wood- 
house — on  the  borders  of  Charnwood  Forest, 

97 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

and  the  beautiful  Beaumanoir  Park,  was 
another  fairyland  to  me  and  to  my  cousins. 
Its  ponds  and  woods  and  reed-beds;  its 
distant  summer-house  between  two  waters, 
where  one  might  live  and  read  and  dream 
through  long  summer  hours,  undisturbed;  its 
pleasant  rooms,  above  all  the  "tapestry 
room"  where  I  generally  slept,  and  which 
I  always  connected  with  the  description  of 
the  huntsman  on  the  "arras,"  in  "Tristram 
and  Iseult";  the  Scott  novels  I  devoured 
there,  and  the  "Court"  nights  at  Beau- 
manoir, where  some  feudal  customs  were  still 
kept  up,  and  its  beautiful  mistress,  Mrs. 
Herrick,  the  young  wife  of  an  old  man, 
queened  it  very  graciously  over  neighbors 
and  tenants — all  these  are  among  the  last- 
ing memories  of  life.  Mrs.  Herrick  became 
identified  in  my  imagination  with  each  suc- 
cessive Scott  heroine, — Rowena,  Isabella, 
Rose  Bradwardine,  the  White  Lady  of 
Avenel,  and  the  rest.  But  it  was  Aunt 
Mary  herself,  after  all,  who  held  the  scene. 
In  that  Leicestershire  world  of  High  Tory- 
ism, she  raised  the  Liberal  flag — her  father's 
flag — with  indomitable  courage,  but  also 
with  a  humor  which,  after  the  tragic  hours 
of  her  youth,  flowered  out  in  her  like  something 
new  and  unexpectedly  delightful.  It  must 
have  been  always  there,  but  not  till  marriage 

98 


.OTHER    CHILDREN    OF    FOX    HOW 

and  motherhood,  and  F.  D.  Maurice's  in- 
fluence, had  given  her  peace  of  soul  does  it 
seem  to  have  shown  itself  as  I  remember  it — 
a  golden  and  pervading  quality,  which  made 
life  unfailingly  pleasant  beside  her.  Her 
clear,  dark  eyes,  with  their  sweet  sincerity, 
and  the  touch  in  them  of  a  quiet  laughter, 
of  which  the  causes  were  not  always  clear 
to  the  bystanders,  her  strong  face  with  its 
points  of  likeness  to  her  father's,  and  all  her 
warm  and  most  human  personality — they 
are  still  vividly  present  to  me,  though  it  is 
nearly  thirty  years  since,  after  an  hour  or 
two's  pain,  she  died  suddenly  and  unexpect- 
edly, of  the  same  malady  that  killed  her 
father.  Consumed  in  her  youth  by  a  pas- 
sionate idealism,  she  had  accepted  at  the 
hands  of  life,  and  by  the  age  of  four  and 
twenty,  a  lot  by  no  means  ideal — a  home  in 
the  depths  of  the  country,  among  neighbors 
often  uncongenial,  and  far  from  the  intel- 
lectual pleasures  she  had  tasted  during  her 
young  widowhood  in  London.  But  out  of 
this  lot  she  made  something  beautiful,  and 
all  her  own — by  sheer  goodness,  conscience, 
intelligence.  She  had  her  angles  and  incon- 
sistencies; she  often  puzzled  those  who 
loved  her;  but  she  had  a  large  brain  and  a 
large  heart;  and  for  us  colonial  children,  con- 
scious of  many  disadvantages  beside  our 

8  99 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

English-born  cousins,  she  had  a  peculiar 
tenderness,  a  peculiar  laughing  sympathy, 
that  led  us  to  feel  in  "Aunt  Maria"  one  of 
our  best  friends. 

Susan  Arnold,  the  Doctor's  fourth  daugh- 
ter, married  Mr.  John  Cropper  in  1858,  and 
here,  too,  in  her  house  beside  the  Mersey, 
among  fields  and  trees  that  still  maintain  a 
green  though  besmutted  oasis  in  the  busy 
heart  of  Liverpool,  that  girdles  them  now  on 
all  sides,  and  will  soon  engulf  them,  there 
were  kindness  and  welcome  for  the  little 
Tasmanians.  She  died  a  few  years  ago, 
mourned  and  missed  by  her  own  people — 
those  lifelong  neighbors  who  know  truly 
what  we  are.  Of  the  fifth  daughter,  Frances, 
"Aunt  Fan,"  I  may  not  speak,  because  she 
is  still  with  us  in  the  old  house — alive  to 
every  political  and  intellectual  interest  of 
these  darkened  days,  beloved  by  innumerable 
friends  in  many  worlds,  and  making  sun- 
shine still  for  Arnold's  grandchildren  and 
their  children's  children.  But  it  was  to  her 
that  my  own  stormy  childhood  was  chiefly 
confided,  at  Fox  How;  it  was  she  who  taught 
the  Tasmanian  child  to  read,  and  grappled 
with  her  tempers;  and  while  she  is  there 
the  same  magic  as  of  old  clings  about  Fox 
How  for  those  of  us  who  have  loved  it,  and 

all  it  stands  for,  so  long. 

100 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   FRIENDS   OF  FOX  HOW 

IT  remains  for  me  now  to  say  something 
*  of  those  friends  of  Fox  How  and  my 
father  whose  influence,  or  whose  living  pres- 
ence, made  the  atmosphere  in  which  the 
second  generation  of  children  who  loved  Fox 
How  grew  up. 

Wordsworth  died  in  1850,  the  year  before 
I  was  born.  He  and  my  grandfather  were 
much  attached  to  each  other — "old  Cole- 
ridge," says  my  grandfather,  "inoculated  a 
little  knot  of  us  with  the  love  of  Wordsworth  " 
— though  their  politics  were  widely  different, 
and  the  poet  sometimes  found  it  hard  to  put 
up  with  the  reforming  views  of  the  younger 
man.  In  a  letter  printed  in  Stanley's  Life 
my  grandfather  mentions  "a  good  fight" 
with  Wordsworth  over  the  Reform  Bill  of 
1832,  on  a  walk  to  Greenhead  Ghyll.  And 
there  is  a  story  told  of  a  girl  friend  of  the 
family  who,  once  when  Wordsworth  had 
been  paying  a  visit  at  Fox  How,  accom- 
panied him  and  the  Doctor  part  of  the  way 
home  to  Rydal  Mount.  Something  was  in- 
advertently said  to  stir  the  old  man's  Tory- 

101 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

ism,  and  he  broke  out  in  indignant  denuncia- 
tion of  some  views  expressed  by  Arnold. 
The  storm  lasted  all  the  way  to  Pelter  Bridge, 
and  the  girl  on  Arnold's  left  stole  various 
alarmed  glances  at  him  to  see  how  he  was 
taking  it.  He  said  little  or  nothing,  and  at 
Pelter  Bridge  they  all  parted,  Wordsworth 
going  on  to  Rydal  Mount,  and  the  other  two 
turning  back  toward  Fox  How.  Arnold 
paced  along,  his  hands  behind  his  back,  his 
eyes  on  the  ground,  and  his  companion 
watched  him,  till  he  suddenly  threw  back 
his  head  with  a  laugh  of  enjoyment. — 
"What  beautiful  English  the  old  man 
talks!" 

The  poet  complained  sometimes — as  I 
find  from  an  amusing  passage  in  the  letter  to 
Mr.  Howson  quoted  below,  that  he  could  not 
see  enough  of  his  neighbor,  the  Doctor,  on  a 
mountain  walk,  because  Arnold  was  always 
so  surrounded  with  children  and  pupils,  "like 
little  dogs"'  running  round  and  after  him. 
But  no  differences,'  great  or  small,  interfered 
with  his  constant  friendship  to  Fox  How. 
The  garden  there  was  largely  planned  by  him 
during  the  family  absences  at  Rugby;  the 
round  chimneys  of  the  house  are  said  to  be 
of  his  design;  and  it  was  for  Fox  How, 
which  still  possesses  the  MS.,  that  the  fine 

sonnet  was  written,  beginning — 

102 


THE    FRIENDS   OF   FOX   HOW 

Wansfell,  this  household  has  a  favored  lot 
Living  with  liberty  on  thee  to  gaze — 

a  sonnet  which  contains,  surely,  two  or 
three  of  the  most  magical  lines  that  Words- 
worth ever  wrote. 

It  is  of  course  no  purpose  of  these  notes  to 
give  any  fresh  account  of  Wordsworth  at 
Rydal,  or  any  exhaustive  record  of  the  rela- 
tions between  the  Wordsworths  and  Fox 
How,  especially  after  the  recent  publication 
of  Professor  Harper's  fresh,  interesting, 
though  debatable  biography.  But  from  the 
letters  in  my  hands  I  glean  a  few  things 
worth  recording.  Here,  for  instance,  is  a 
passing  picture  of  Matthew  Arnold  and 
Wordsworth  in  the  Fox  How  drawing-room 
together,  in  January,  1848,  which  I  find  in 
a  letter  from  my  grandmother  to  my 
father: 

Matt  has  been  very  much  pleased,  I  think,  by 
what  he  has  seen  of  dear  old  Wordsworth  since 
he  has  been  at  home,  and  certainly  he  manages 
to  draw  him  out  very  well.  The  old  man  was 
here  yesterday,  and  as  he  sat  on  the  stool  in  the 
corner  beside  the  fire  which  you  knew  so  well, 
he  talked  of  various  subjects  of  interest,  of 
Italian  poetry,  of  Coleridge,  etc.,  etc.;  and  he 
looked  and  spoke  with  more  vigor  than  he  has 
often  done  lately. 

103 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

But  the  poet's  health  was  failing.  His 
daughter  Dora's  death  in  1847  had  hit  him 
terribly  hard,  and  his  sister's  state — the  help- 
less though  gentle  insanity  of  the  unique, 
the  beloved  Dorothy — weighed  heavily  on 
his  weakening  strength.  I  find  a  touching 
picture  of  him  in  the  unpublished  letter  re- 
ferred to  on  a  previous  page,  written  in  this 
very  year — 1848 — to  Dean  Howson,  as  a 
young  man,  by  his  former  pupil,  the  late 
Duke  of  Argyll,  the  distinguished  author  of 
The  Reign  of  Law — which  Dean  Howson's 
son  and  the  Duke's  grandson  allow  me  to 
print.  The  Rev.  J.  S.  Howson,  afterward 
Dean  of  Chester,  married  a  sister  of  the  John 
Cropper  who  married  Susan  Arnold,  and 
was  thus  a  few  years  later  brought  into  con- 
nection with  the  Arnolds  and  Fox  How. 
The  Duke  and  Duchess  had  set  out  to  visit 
both  the  Lakes  and  the  Lakes  "  celebrities," 
advised,  evidently,  as  to  their  tour,  by  the 
Duke's  old  tutor,  who  was  already  familiar 
with  the  valleys  and  some  of  their  inmates. 
Their  visit  to  Fox  How  is  only  briefly  men- 
tioned, but  of  Wordsworth  and  Rydal  Mount 
the  Duke  gives  a  long  account.  The  picture, 
first,  of  drooping  health  and  spirits,  and  then 
of  the  flaming  out  of  the  old  poetic  fire, 
will,  I  think,  interest  any  true  Words- 
worthian. 

104 


THE    FRIENDS    OF   FOX    HOW 

On  Saturday  [writes  the  Duke]  we  reached 
Ambleside  and  soon  after  drove  to  Rydal  Mount. 
We  found  the  Poet  seated  at  his  fireside,  and  a 
little  languid  in  manner.  He  became  less  so  as 
he  talked.  .  .  .  He  talked  incessantly,  but  not 
generally  interestingly.  ...  I  looked  at  him  often 
and  asked  myself  if  that  was  the  man  who  had 
stamped  the  impress  of  his  own  mind  so  decidedly 
on  a  great  part  of  the  literature  of  his  age!  He 
took  us  to  see  a  waterfall  near  his  house,  and  talked 
and  chattered,  but  said  nothing  remarkable  or  even 
thoughtful.  Yet  I  could  see  that  all  this  was  only 
that  we  were  on  the  surface,  and  did  not  indicate 
any  decay  of  mental  powers.  [Still]  we  went  away 
with  no  other  impression  than  the  vaguest  of  hav- 
ing seen  the  man,  whose  writings  we  knew  so 
well — and  with  no  feeling  that  we  had  seen  any- 
thing of  the  mind  which  spoke  through  them. 

On  the  following  day,  Sunday,  the  Duke 
with  a  friend  walked  over  to  Rydal,  but  found 
no  one  at  the  Mount  but  an  invalid  lady,  very 
old,  and  apparently  paralyzed,  "drawn  in  a 
bath  chair  by  a  servant."  They  did  not  realize 
that  the  poor  sufferer,  with  her  wandering 
speech  and  looks,  was  Dorothy  Wordsworth, 
whose  share  in  her  great  brother's  fame  will 
never  be  forgotten  while  literature  lasts. 

In  the  evening,  however — 

.  .  .  after  visiting  Mrs.  Arnold  we  drove  together 
to  bid  Wordsworth  good-by,  as  we  were  to  go 

105 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

next  morning.  We  found  the  old  man  as  before, 
seated  by  the  fireside  and  languid  and  sleepy  in 
manner.  Again  he  awakened  as  conversation 
went  on,  and,  a  stranger  coming  in,  we  rose  to 
go  away.  He  seemed  unwilling  that  we  should 
go  so  soon,  and  said  he  would  walk  out  with  us. 
We  went  to  the  mound  in  front,  and  the  Duchess 
then  asked  if  he  would  repeat  some  of  his  own 
lines  to  us.  He  said  he  hardly  thought  he  could 
do  that,  but  that  he  would  have  been  glad  to  read 
some  to  us.  We  stood  looking  at  the  view  for 
some  tune,  when  Mrs.  Wordsworth  came  out 
and  asked  us  back  to  the  house  to  take  some  tea. 
This  was  just  what  we  wanted.  We  sat  for 
about  half  an  hour  at  tea,  during  which  I  tried 
to  direct  the  conversation  to  interesting  subjects 
— Coleridge,  Southey,  etc.  He  gave  a  very  dif- 
ferent impression  from  the  preceding  evening. 
His  memory  seemed  clear  and  unclouded — his 
remarks  forcible  and  decided — with  some  ten- 
dency to  run  off  to  irrelevant  anecdote. 

When  tea  was  over,  we  renewed  our  request 
that  he  should  read  to  us.  He  said,  "Oh  dear, 
that  is  terrible!"  but  consented,  asking  what  we 
chose.  He  jumped  at  "Tintern  Abbey"  in 
preference  to  any  part  of  the  "Excursion." 

He  told  us  he  had  written  "Tintern  Abbey" 
in  1798,  taking  four  days  to  compose  it;  the  last 
twenty  lines  or  so  being  composed  as  he  walked 
down  the  hill  from  Clifton  to  Bristol.  It  was 
curious  to  feel  that  we  were  to  hear  a  Poet 
read  his  own  verses  composed  fifty  years  before. 

He  read  the  introductory  lines  descriptive  of 
106 


THE    FRIENDS   OF   FOX    HOW 

the  scenery  in  a  low,  clear  voice.  But  when  he 
came  to  the  thoughtful  and  reflective  lines,  his 
tones  deepened  and  he  poured  them  forth  with  a 
fervor  and  almost  passion  of  delivery  which  was 
very  striking  and  beautiful.  I  observed  that 
Mrs.  Wordsworth  was  strongly  affected  during 
the  reading.  The  strong  emphasis  that  he  put 
on  the  words  addressed  to  the  person  to  whom 
the  poem  is  written  struck  me  as  almost  un- 
natural at  the  time.  "My  DEAE,  DEAR  friend!" 
— and  on  the  words,  "In  thy  wild  eyes."  It 
was  not  till  after  the  reading  was  over  that  we 
found  out  that  the  poor  paralytic  invalid  we  had 
seen  in  the  morning  was  the  sister  to  whom  "Tin- 
tern  Abbey"  was  addressed,  and  her  condition, 
now,  accounted  for  the  fervor  with  which  the 
old  Poet  read  lines  which  reminded  him  of  their 
better  days.  But  it  was  melancholy  to  think 
that  the  vacant  gaze  we  had  seen  in  the  morning 
was  from  the  "wild  eyes"  of  1798. 

.  .  .  We  could  not  have  had  a  better  oppor- 
tunity of  bringing  out  in  his  reading  the  source 
of  the  inspiration  of  his  poetry,  which  it  was 
impossible  not  to  feel  was  the  poetry  of  the 
heart.  Mrs.  Wordsworth  told  me  it  was  the 
first  time  he  had  read  since  his  daughter's  death, 
and  that  she  was  thankful  to  us  for  having  made 
him  do  it,  as  he  was  apt  to  fall  into  a  listless, 
languid  state.  We  asked  him  to  come  to  In- 
verary.  He  said  he  had  not  courage;  as  he 
had  last  gone  through  that  country  with  his 
daughter,  and  he  feared  it  would  be  too  much 
for  him. 

107 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

Less  than  two  years  after  this  visit,  on 
April  23,  1850,  the  deathday  of  Shakespeare 
and  Cervantes,  Arnold's  youngest  daugh- 
ter, now  Miss  Arnold  of  Fox  How,  was 
walking  with  her  sister  Susan  on  the  side  of 
Loughrigg  which  overlooks  Rydal  Mount. 
They  knew  that  the  last  hour  of  a  great  poet 
was  near — to  my  aunts,  not  only  a  great 
poet,  but  the  familiar  friend  of  their  dead 
father  and  all  their  kindred.  They  moved 
through  the  April  day,  along  the  mountain- 
side, under  the  shadow  of  death;  and,  sud- 
denly, as  they  looked  at  the  old  house  oppo- 
site, unseen  hands  drew  down  the  blinds; 
and  by  the  darkened  windows  they  knew 
that  the  life  of  Wordsworth  had  gone  out. 

Henceforward,  in  the  family  letters  to  my 
father,  it  is  Mrs.  Wordsworth  who  comes 
into  the  foreground.  The  old  age  prophesied 
for  her  by  her  poet  bridegroom  in  the  early 
Grasmere  days  was  about  her  for  the  nine 
years  of  her  widowhood,  "  lovely  as  a  Lap- 
land night";  or  rather  like  one  of  her  own 
Rydal  evenings  when  the  sky  is  clear  over 
the  perfect  little  lake,  and  the  reflections  of 
island  and  wood  and  fell  go  down  and  down, 
unearthly  far  into  the  quiet  depths,  and 
Wansfell  still  "parleys  with  the  setting  sun." 
My  grandmother  writes  of  her — of  "her 
sweet  grace  and  dignity,"  and  the  little 

108 


THE    FRIENDS    OF   FOX   HOW 

friendly  acts  she  is  always  doing  for  this 
person  and  that,  gentle  or  simple,  in  the 
valley — with  a  tender  enthusiasm.  She  is 
"  dear  Mrs. Wordsworth  "  always,  for  them  all. 
And  it  is  my  joy  that  in  the  year  1856  or  1857 
my  grandmother  took  me  to  Rydal  Mount, 
and  that  I  can  vividly  recollect  sitting  on  a 
footstool  at  Mrs.  Wordsworth's  feet.  I  see 
still  the  little  room,  with  its  plain  furniture, 
the  chair  beside  the  fire,  and  the  old  lady  in 
it.  I  can  still  recall  the  childish  feeling  that 
this  was  no  common  visit,  and  the  house  no 
common  house — that  a  presence  still  haunted 
it.  Instinctively  the  childish  mind  said  to 
itself,  " Remember!" — and  I  have  always 
remembered. 

A  few  years  later  I  was  again,  as  a  child 
of  eight,  in  Rydal  Mount.  Mrs.  Words- 
worth was  dead,  and  there  was  a  sale  in  the 
house.  From  far  and  near  the  neighbors 
came,  very  curious,  very  full  of  real  regret, 
and  a  little  awe-stricken.  They  streamed 
through  the  rooms  where  the  furniture  was 
arranged  in  lots.  I  wandered  about  by  my- 
self, and  presently  came  upon  something 
which  absorbed  me  so  that  I  forgot  every- 
thing else — a  store  of  Easter  eggs,  with 
wonderful  drawings  and  devices,  made  by 
"  James,"  the  Rydal  Mount  factotum,  in  the 
poet's  day.  I  recollect  sitting  down  with 

109 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

them  in  a  nearly  empty  room,  dreaming  over 
them  in  a  kind  of  ecstasy,  because  of  their 
pretty,  strange  colors  and  pictures. 

Fifty-two  years  passed,  and  I  found  my- 
self, in  September,  1911,  the  tenant  of  a 
renovated  and  rebuilt  Rydal  Mount,  for  a 
few  autumn  weeks.  The  house  was  oc- 
cupied then,  and  is  still  occupied  by  Words- 
worth's great-granddaughter  and  her  hus- 
band— Mr.  and  Mrs.  Fisher  Wordsworth. 
My  eldest  daughter  was  with  me,  and  a 
strange  thing  happened  to  us.  I  arrived  at 
the  Mount  before  my  husband  and  daughter. 
She  joined  me  there  on  September  13th.  I 
remember  how  eagerly  I  showed  her  the 
many  Wordsworthiana  in  the  house,  col- 
lected by  the  piety  of  its  mistress — the  Hay- 
don  portrait  on  the  stairs,  and  the  books, 
in  the  small  low-ceiled  room  to  the  right  of 
the  hall,  which  is  still  just  as  it  was  in 
Wordsworth's  day;  the  garden,  too,  and  the 
poet's  walk.  All  my  own  early  recollections 
were  alive;  we  chattered  long  and  late.  And 
now  let  the  account  of  what  happened  after- 
ward be  given  in  my  daughter's  words  as  she 
wrote  it  down  for  me  the  following  morning. 

RYDAL  MOUNT,  September  14,  1911. 

Last  night,  my  first  at  Rydal  Mount,  I  slept 

in  the  corner  room,  over  the  small  sitting-room. 

110 


THE   FRIENDS   OF   FOX   HOW 

I  had  drawn  up  the  blind  about  half-way  up 
the  window  before  going  to  bed,  and  had  drawn 
the  curtain  aside,  over  the  back  of  a  wooden 
arm-chair  that  stood  against  the  window.  The 
window,  a  casement,  was  wide  open.  I  slept 
soundly,  but  woke  quite  suddenly,  at  what  hour 
I  do  not  know,  and  found  myself  sitting  bolt 
upright  in  bed,  looking  toward  the  window. 
Very  bright  moonlight  was  shining  into  the  room 
and  I  could  just  see  the  corner  of  Loughrigg  out 
in  the  distance.  My  first  impression  was  of 
bright  moonlight,  but  then  I  became  strongly 
conscious  of  the  moonlight  striking  on  some- 
thing, and  I  saw  perfectly  clearly  the  figure  of 
an  old  man  sitting  in  the  arm-chair  by  the  win- 
dow. I  said  to  myself,  "That's  Wordsworth!" 
He  was  sitting  with  either  hand  resting  on  the 
arms  of  the  chair,  leaning  back,  his  head  rather 
bent,  and  he  seemed  to  be  looking  down  straight 
in  front  of  him  with  a  rapt  expression.  He  was 
not  looking  at  me,  nor  out  of  the  window.  The 
moonlight  lit  up  the  top  of  his  head  and  the 
silvery  hair  and  I  noticed  that  the  hair  was  very 
thin.  The  whole  impression  was  of  something 
solemn  and  beautiful,  and  I  was  not  in  the  very 
least  frightened.  As  I  looked — I  cannot  say, 
when  I  looked  again,  for  I  have  no  recollection 
of  ceasing  to  look,  or  looking  away — the  figure 
disappeared  and  I  became  aware  of  the  empty 
chair. — I  lay  back  again,  and  thought  for  a 
moment  in  a  pleased  and  contented  way,  "That 
was  Wordsworth."  And  almost  immediately  I 

must  have  fallen  asleep  again.     I  had  not,  to  my 

111 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

knowledge,  been  dreaming  about  Wordsworth 
before  I  awoke;  but  I  had  been  reading  Hut- 
ton's  essay  on  " Wordsworth's  Two  Styles" 
out  of  Knight's  Wordsworthiana,  before  I  fell 
asleep. 

I  should  add  that  I  had  a  distinct  impression 
of  the  high  collar  and  stock,  the  same  as  in  the 
picture  on  the  stairs  hi  this  house. 

Neither  the  seer  of  this  striking  vision — 
unique  in  her  experience — nor  I,  to  whom 
she  told  it  within  eight  hours,  make  any 
claim  for  it  to  a  supernatural  origin.  It 
seemed  to  us  an  interesting  example  of  the 
influence  of  mind  and  association  on  the 
visualizing  power  of  the  brain.  A  member 
of  the  Psychical  Society,  to  whom  I  sent  the 
contemporary  record,  classified  it  as  "  a  visual 
hallucination,"  and  I  don't  know  that  there 
is  anything  more  to  be  said  about  it.  But 
the  pathetic  coincidence  remains  still  to  be 
noted — we  did  not  know  it  till  afterward — 
that  the  seer  of  the  vision  was  sleeping  in 
Dorothy  Wordsworth's  room,  where  Dorothy 
spent  so  many  sad  years  of  death-in-life; 
and  that  in  that  very  corner  by  the  window 
Wordsworth  must  have  sat,  day  after  day, 
when  he  came  to  visit  what  remained  to  him 
of  that  creature  of  fire  and  dew,  that  child 
of  genius,  who  had  been  the  inspiration  and 

support  of  his  poetic  youth. 

112 


THE    FRIENDS    OF    FOX    HOW 

In  these  rapid  sketches  of  the  surroundings 
and  personal  influences  amid  which  my  own 
childhood  was  passed  I  have  already  said 
something  of  my  father's  intimate  friend 
Arthur  Hugh  Clough.  Clough  was,  of  course, 
a  Rugbeian,  and  one  of  Arnold's  ablest  and 
most  devoted  pupils.  He  was  about  three 
years  older  than  my  father,  and  was  already 
a  Fellow  of  Oriel  when  Thomas  Arnold,  the 
younger,  was  reading  for  his  First.  But  the 
difference  of  age  made  no  difference  to  the 
friendship  which  grew  up  between  them  in 
Oxford,  a  friendship  only  less  enduring  and 
close  than  that  between  Clough  and  Matthew 
Arnold,  which  has  been  "  eternized,"  to  use 
a  word  of  Fulke  Greville's,  by  the  noble 
dirge  of  "Thyrsis."  Not  many  years  before 
his  own  death,  in  1895,  my  father  wrote  of 
the  friend  of  his  youth: 

I  loved  him,  oh,  so  well:  and  also  respected 
him  more  profoundly  than  any  man,  anywhere 
near  my  own  age,  whom  I  ever  met.  His  pure 
soul  was  without  stain:  he  seemed  incapable  of 
being  inflamed  by  wrath,  or  tempted  to  vice,  or 
enslaved  by  any  unworthy  passion  of  any  sort. 
As  to  "Philip,"  something  that  he  saw  in  me 
helped  to  suggest  the  character — that  was  all. 
There  is  much  in  Philip  that  is  Clough  himself, 
and  there  is  a  dialectic  force  in  him  that  cer- 
tainly was  never  in  me.  A  great  yearning  for 

113 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

possessing  one's  soul  in  freedom — for  trampling 
on  ceremony  and  palaver,  for  trying  experiments 
in  equality,  being  common  to  me  and  Philip, 
sent  me  out  to  New  Zealand;  and  in  the  two 
years  before  I  sailed  (December,  1847)  Clough 
and  I  were  a  great  deal  together. 

It  was  partly  also  the  visit  paid  by  my 
father  and  his  friend,  John  Campbell  Shairp, 
afterward  Principal  Shairp  of  St.  Andrew's, 
to  dough's  reading  party  at  Drumnadrochit 
in  1845,  and  their  report  of  incidents  which 
had  happened  to  them  on  their  way  along 
the  shores  of  Loch  Ericht,  which  suggested 
the  scheme  of  the  "Bothie."  One  of  the 
half-dozen  short  poems  of  Clough  which  have 
entered  permanently  into  literature — Qui 
laborat  orat — was  found  by  my  father  one 
morning  on  the  table  of  his  bachelor  rooms 
in  Mount  Street,  after  Clough  had  spent  the 
night  on  a  shake-up  in  his  sitting-room,  and 
on  his  early  departure  had  left  the  poem 
behind  him  as  payment  for  his  night's  lodging. 
In  one  of  dough's  letters  to  New  Zealand 
I  find,  "Say  not  the  struggle  nought  avail- 
eth" — another  of  the  half-dozen — written 
out  by  him;  and  the  original  copy — tibi 
primo  confisum,  of  the  pretty,  though  un- 
equal verses,  "  A  London  Idyll."  The  little 
volume  of  miscellaneous  poems,  called  Am- 
barvalia,  and  the  "Bothie  of  Tober-na-Vuo- 

114 


THE    FRIENDS    OF    FOX    HOW 

lich"  were  sent  out  to  New  Zealand  by 
Clough,  at  the  same  moment  that  Matt 
was  sending  his  brother  the  Poems  by  A. 

Clough  writes  from  Liverpool  in  Feb- 
ruary, 1849 — having  just  received  Matt's 
volume: 

At  last  our  own  Matt's  book !  Read  mine  first, 
my  child,  if  our  volumes  go  forth  together. 
Otherwise  you  won't  read  mine — Ambarvalia,  at 
any  rate — at  all.  Froude  also  has  published  a 
new  book  of  religious  biography,  auto  or  other- 
wise (The  Nemesis  of  Faith),  and  therewithal  re- 
signs his  Fellowship.  But  the  Rector  (of  Exeter) 
talks  of  not  accepting  the  resignation,  but  having 
an  expulsion — fire  and  fagot  fashion.  Quo  usque? 

But  when  the  books  arrive,  my  father 
writes  to  his  sister  with  affectionate  welcome 
indeed  of  the  Poems  by  A,  but  with  enthu- 
siasm of  the  "Bothie." 

It  greatly  surpasses  my  expectations!  It  is  on 
the  whole  a  noble  poem,  well  held  together,  clear, 
full  of  purpose,  and  full  of  promise.  With  joy 
I  see  the  old  fellow  bestiring  himself,  "awakening 
like  a  strong  man  out  of  sleep  and  shaking  his 
invincible  locks";  and  if  he  remains  true  and 
works,  I  think  there  is  nothing  too  high  or  too 
great  to  be  expected  from  him. 

"True,"  and  a  worker,  Clough  remained 
to  the  last  hours  of  his  short  life.  But  in 

9  115 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

spite  of  a  happy  marriage,  the  burden  and 
perplexity  of  philosophic  thought,  together 
with  the  strain  of  failing  health,  checked, 
before  long,  the  strong  poetic  impulse  shown 
in  the  "Bothie,"  its  buoyant  delight  in 
natural  beauty,  and  in  the  simplicities  of 
human  feeling  and  passion.  The  "music" 
of  his  "rustic  flute" 

Kept  not  for  long  its  happy,  country  tone; 

Lost  it  too  soon,  and  learnt  a  stormy  note 
Of  men  contention-tost,  of  men  who  groan. 

The  poet  of  the  "Bothie"  becomes  the 
poet  of  "Dipsychus,"  "Easter  Day,"  and 
the  "Amours  de  Voyage";  and  the  young 
republican  who  writes  in  triumph — all  hu- 
morous joy  and  animation — to  my  father, 
from  the  Paris  of  1848,  which  has  just  seen  the 
overthrow  of  Louis  Philippe,  says,  a  year 
later— February  24,  1849: 

To-day,  my  dear  brother  republican,  is  the 
glorious  anniversary  of  '48,  whereof  what  shall 
I  now  say?  Put  not  your  trust  in  republics,  nor 
in  any  constitution  of  man!  God  be  praised  for 
the  downfall  of  Louis  Philippe.  This  with  a 
faint  feeble  echo  of  that  loud  last  year's  scream  of 
"A  bas  Guizot!"  seems  to  be  the  sum  total. 
Or  are  we  to  salute  the  rising  sun,  with  "Vive 
VEmpereur!"  and  the  green  liveries?  President 
for  life  I  think  they'll  make  him,  and  then  begin 

116 


THE    FRIENDS    OF    FOX   HOW 

to  tire  of  him.  Meanwhile  the  Great  Powers 
are  to  restore  the  Pope  and  crush  the  renascent 
Roman  Republic,  of  which  Joseph  Mazzini  has 
just  been  declared  a  citizen! 

A  few  months  later,  the  writer — at  Rome — 
"was  in  at  the  death"  of  this  same  Roman 
Republic,  listening  to  the  French  bombard- 
ment in  bitterness  of  soul. 

I  saw  the  French  enter  [he  writes  to  my  father]. 
Unto  this  has  come  our  grand  Lib.  Eq.  and  Frat. 
revolution!  And  then  I  went  to  Naples — and 
home.  I  am  full  of  admiration  for  Mazzini. 
.  .  .  But  on  the  whole— " Farewell  Politics!"  ut- 
terly!— What  can  I  do?  Study  is  much  more  to 
the  purpose. 

So  in  disillusion  and  disappointment, 
"  Citizen  Clough,"  leaving  Oxford  and  poli- 
tics behind  him,  settled  down  to  educational 
work  in  London,  married,  and  became  the 
happy  father  of  children,  wrote  much  that 
was  remarkable,  and  will  be  long  read — 
whether  it  be  poetry  or  no — by  those  who 
find  perennial  attraction  in  the  lesser-known 
ways  of  literature  and  thought,  and  at  last 
closed  his  short  life  at  Florence  in  1862, 
at  the  age  of  forty-one,  leaving  an  indelible 
memory  in  the  hearts  of  those  who  had  talked 
and  lived  with  him. 

117 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

To  a  boon  southern  country  he  is  fled, 
And  now  in  happier  air, 

Wandering  with  the  Great  Mother's  train  divine 
(And  purer  or  more  subtle  soul  than  thee, 
I  trow  the  mighty  Mother  doth  not  see) 

Within  a  folding  of  the  Apennine, 

Thou  hearest  the  immortal  chants  of  old! — 

But  I  remember  him,  in  an  English  setting, 
and  on  the  slopes  of  English  hills.  In  the 
year  1858,  as  a  child  of  seven,  I  was  an 
inmate  of  a  little  school  kept  at  Ambleside, 
by  Miss  Anne  Clough,  the  poet's  sister,  after- 
ward the  well-known  head  of  Newnham 
College,  Cambridge,  and  wisest  leader  in 
the  cause  of  women.  It  was  a  small  day- 
school  for  Ambleside  children  of  all  ranks, 
and  I  was  one  of  two  boarders,  spending  my 
Sundays  often  at  Fox  How.  I  can  recall 
one  or  two  golden  days,  at  long  intervals, 
when  my  father  came  for  me,  with  "Mr. 
Clough,"  and  the  two  old  friends,  who,  after 
nine  years'  separation,  had  recently  met 
again,  walked  up  the  Sweden  Bridge  lane 
into  the  heart  of  Scandale  Fell,  while  I,  pay- 
ing no  more  attention  to  them  than  they — 
after  a  first  ten  minutes — did  to  me,  went 
wandering  and  skipping  and  dreaming  by 
myself.  In  those  days  every  rock  along  the 
mountain  lane,  every  boggy  patch,  every 

118 


THE   FRIENDS   OF   FOX   HOW 

stretch  of  silken,  flower-sown  grass,  every 
bend  of  the  wild  stream,  and  all  its  sounds, 
whether  it  chattered  gently  over  stony  shal- 
lows or  leaped  full-throated  into  deep  pools, 
swimming  with  foam — were  to  me  the  never- 
ending  joys  of  a  "land  of  pure  delight." 
Should  I  find  a  ripe  wild  strawberry  in  a 
patch  under  a  particular  rock  I  knew  by 
heart? — or  the  first  Grass  of  Parnassus,  or 
the  big  auricula,  or  streaming  cotton-plant, 
amid  a  stretch  of  wet  moss  ahead?    I  might 
quite  safely  explore  these  enchanted  spots 
under  male  eyes,  since  they  took  no  account, 
mercifully,  of  a  child's  boots  and  stockings- 
male  tongues,  besides,  being  safely  busy  with 
books  and  politics.     Was  that  a  dipper,  rising 
and  falling  along  the  stream,  or — positively — 
a  fat  brown  trout  in  hiding  under  that  shady 
bank? — or  that  a  buzzard,  hovering  over- 
head.    Such  hopes  and  doubts  kept  a  child's 
heart  and  eyes  as  quick  and  busy  as  the 
"beck"  itself.     It  was  a  point  of  honor  with 
me  to  get  to  Sweden  Bridge — a  rough  crossing 
for  the  shepherds  and  sheep,  near  the  head  of 
the  valley — before  my  companions;    and  I 
would  sit  dangling  my  feet  over  the  unpro- 
tected edge  of  its  grass-grown  arch,  bliss- 
fully conscious  on  a  summer  day  of  the  warm 
stretches  of  golden  fell  folding  in  the  stream, 
the  sheep,  the  hovering  hawks,  the  stony 

119 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

path  that  wound  up  and  up  to  regions  be- 
yond the  ken  of  thought;  and  of  myself, 
queening  it  there  on  the  weather-worn  key- 
stone of  the  bridge,  dissolved  in  the  mere 
physical  joy  of  each  contented  sense — the 
sun  on  my  cotton  dress,  the  scents  from 
grass  and  moss,  the  marvelous  rush  of  cloud- 
shadow  along  the  hills,  the  brilliant  browns 
and  blues  in  the  water,  the  little  white 
stones  on  its  tiny  beaches,  or  the  purples 
of  the  bigger  rocks,  whether  in  the  stream 
or  on  the  mountain-side.  How  did  they 
come  there — those  big  rocks?  I  puzzled 
my  head  about  them  a  good  deal,  especially 
as  my  father,  in  the  walks  we  had  to  our- 
selves, would  sometimes  try  and  teach  me  a 
little  geology. 

I  have  used  the  words  " physical  joy,"  be- 
cause, although  such  passionate  pleasure  in 
natural  things  as  has  been  my  constant 
Helper  (in  the  sense  of  the  Greek  eVucou/jos) 
through  life,  has  connected  itself,  no  doubt, 
in  process  of  time,  with  various  intimate  be- 
liefs, philosophic  or  religious,  as  to  the  Beauty 
which  is  Truth,  and  therewith  the  only  con- 
ceivable key  to  man's  experience,  yet  I 
could  not  myself  indorse  the  famous  contrast 
in  Wordsworth's  "Tintern  Abbey,"  between 
the  " haunting  passion"  of  youth's  delight  in 

Nature,   and  the  more  complex  feeling  of 

120 


THE    FRIENDS    OF   FOX    HOW 

later  years  when  Nature  takes  an  aspect 
colored  by  our  own  moods  and  memories, 
when  our  sorrows  and  reflections  enter  so 
much  into  what  we  feel  about  the  "  bright 
and  intricate  device"  of  earth  and  her  sea- 
sons, that  "in  our  life  alone  doth  Nature 
live."  No  one  can  answer  for  the  changing 
moods  that  the  future,  long  or  short,  may 
bring  with  it.  But  so  far,  I  am  inclined  to 
think  of  this  quick,  intense  pleasure  in 
natural  things,  which  I  notice  in  myself  and 
others,  as  something  involuntary  and  inbred; 
independent — often  selfishly  independent — 
of  the  real  human  experience.  I  have  been 
sometimes  ashamed — pricked  even  with  self- 
contempt — to  remember  how  in  the  course 
of  some  tragic  or  sorrowful  hours,  concerning 
myself,  or  others  of  great  account  to  me,  I 
could  not  help  observing  some  change  in  the 
clouds,  some  effect  of  color  in  the  garden, 
some  picture  on  the  wall,  which  pleased  me 
—even  for  the  moment — intensely.  The  im- 
pression would  be  gone,  perhaps,  as  soon  as 
felt,  rebuked  by  something  like  a  flash  of 
remorse.  But  it  was  not  in  my  power  to 
prevent  its  recurrence.  And  the  delight  in 
natural  things — colors,  forms,  scents — when 
there  was  nothing  to  restrain  or  hamper  it, 
has  often  been  a  kind  of  intoxication,  in 

which   thought    and    consciousness    seemed 

121 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

suspended — "as  though  of  hemlock  one  had 
drunk."  Wordsworth  has  of  course  expressed 
it  constantly,  though  increasingly,  as  life 
went  on,  in  combination  with  his  pantheistic 
philosophy.  But  it  is  my  belief  that  it  sur- 
vived in  him  in  its  primitive  form,  almost  to 
the  end. 

The  best  and  noblest  people  I  have  known 
have  been,  on  the  whole — except  in  first 
youth — without  this  correspondence  between 
some  constant  pleasure-sense  in  the  mind, 
and  natural  beauty.  It  cannot,  therefore,  be 
anything  to  be  proud  of.  But  it  is  certainly 
something  to  be  glad  of — "amid  the  chances 
and  changes  of  this  mortal  life";  it  is  one 
of  the  joys  "in  widest  commonalty  spread" 
— and  that  may  last  longest.  It  is  therefore 
surely  to  be  encouraged  both  in  oneself  and 
in  children;  and  that,  although  I  have  often 
felt  that  there  is  something  inhuman,  or  in- 
frahuman,  in  it,  as  though  the  earth-gods  in 
us  all — Pan,  or  Demeter — laid  ghostly  hands 
again,  for  a  space,  upon  the  soul  and  sense 
that  nobler  or  sadder  faiths  have  ravished 
from  them. 

In  these  Westmorland  walks,  however,  my 
father  had  sometimes  another  companion — a 
frequent  visitor  at  Fox  How,  where  he  was 
almost  another  son  to  my  grandmother,  and 
an  elder  brother  to  her  children.  How  shall 


THE    FRIENDS   OF   FOX   HOW 

one  ever  make  the  later  generation  under- 
stand the  charm  of  Arthur  Stanley?  There 
are  many — very  many — still  living,  in  whom 
the  sense  of  it  leaps  up,  at  the  very  mention 
of  his  name.  But  for  those  who  never  saw 
him,  who  are  still  in  their  twenties  and 
thirties,  what  shall  I  say?  That  he  was  the 
son  of  a  Bishop  of  Norwich  and  a  member 
of  the  old  Cheshire  family  of  the  Stanleys 
of  Alderley;  that  he  was  a  Rugby  boy  and 
a  devoted  pupil  of  Arnold,  whose  Life  he 
wrote,  so  that  it  stands  out  among  the 
biographies  of  the  century,  not  only  for  its 
literary  merit,  but  for  its  wide  and  varied 
influence  on  feeling  and  opinion ;  that  he  was 
an  Oxford  tutor  and  Professor  all  through  the 
great  struggle  of  Liberal  thought  against  the 
reactionary  influences  let  loose  by  Newman 
and  the  Tractarian  movement;  that,  as 
Regius  Professor  at  Oxford,  and  Canon  of 
Canterbury,  if  he  added  little  to  learning,  or 
research,  he  at  least  kept  alive — by  his  power 
of  turning  all  he  knew  into  image  and  color 
— that  great  "art"  of  history  which  the 
Dryasdusts  so  willingly  let  die*,  that  as  Dean 
of  Westminster,  he  was  still  the  life  and  soul 
of  all  the  Liberalism  in  the  Church,  still  the 
same  generous  friend  and  champion  of  all 
the  spiritually  oppressed  that  he  had  ever 
been?  None  of  the  old  " causes"  beloved 

123 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

of  his  youth  could  ever  have  said  of  him,  as 
of  so  many  others: 

Just  for  a  handful  of  silver  he  left  us, 
Just  for  a  ribbon  to  stick  in  his  coat — 

He  was,  no  doubt,  the  friend  of  kings  and 
princes,  and  keenly  conscious,  always,  of 
things  long-descended,  with  picturesque  or 
heroic  associations.  But  it  was  he  who  in- 
vited Colenso  to  preach  in  the  Abbey,  after 
his  excommunication  by  the  fanatical  and 
now  forgotten  Bishop  of  Cape  Town;  it  was 
he  who  brought  about  that  famous  Com- 
munion of  the  Revisers  in  the  Abbey,  where 
the  Unitarian  received  the  Sacrament  of 
Christ's  death  beside  the  Wesleyan  and  the 
Anglican,  and  who  bore  with  unflinching 
courage  the  idle  tumult  which  followed;  it 
was  he,  too,  who  first  took  special  pains  to 
open  the  historical  Abbey  to  working-men, 
and  to  give  them  an  insight  into  the  meaning 
of  its  treasures.  He  was  not  a  social  reformer 
in  the  modern  sense;  that  was  not  his  busi- 
ness. But  his  unfailing  power  of  seeing  and 
pouncing  upon  the  interesting — the  dramatic 
—in  any  human  lot,  soon  brought  him  into 
relation  with  men  of  callings  and  types  the 
most  different  from  his  own;  and  for  the  rest 
he  fulfilled  to  perfection  that  hard  duty — 
"the  duty  to  our  equals" — on  which  Mr. 

124 


THE   FRIENDS    OF    FOX    HOW 

Jowett  once  preached  a  caustic  and  sugges- 
tive sermon.  But  for  him  John  Richard 
Green  would  have  abandoned  history,  and 
student  after  student,  heretic  after  heretic, 
found  in  him  the  man  who  eagerly  under- 
stood them  and  chivalrously  fought  for  them. 
And  then,  what  a  joy  he  was  to  the  eye! 
His  small  spare  figure,  miracuously  light,  his 
delicate  face  of  tinted  ivory — only  that  ivory 
is  not  sensitive  and  subtle,  and  incredibly 
expressive,  as  were  the  features  of  the  little 
Dean;  the  eager,  thin-lipped  mouth,  varying 
with  every  shade  of  feeling  in  the  innocent 
great  soul  behind  it;  the  clear  eyes  of  china 
blue;  the  glistening  white  hair,  still  with 
the  wave  and  spring  of  youth  'in  it;  the 
slender  legs,  and  Dean's  dress,  which  be- 
comes all  but  the  portly,  with,  on  festal  oc- 
casions, the  red  ribbon  of  the  Bath  crossing 
the  mercurial  frame:  there  are  still  a  few 
pictures  and  photographs  by  which  these 
characteristics  are  dimly  recalled  to  those  at 
least  who  knew  the  living  man.  To  my 
father,  who  called  him  " Arthur,"  and  to  all 
the  Fox  How  circle,  he  was  the  most  faithful 
of  friends,  though  no  doubt  my  father's  con- 
version to  Catholicism  to  some  extent,  in 
later  years,  separated  him  from  Stanley.  In 
the  letter  I  have  printed  on  a  former  page, 
written  on  the  night  before  my  father  left 

125 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

England  for  New  Zealand  in  1847,  and  cher- 
ished by  its  recipient  all  his  life,  there  is  a 
yearning,  personal  note,  which  was,  per- 
haps, sometimes  lacking  in  the  much-sur- 
rounded, much-courted  Dean  of  later  life. 
It  was  not  that  Arthur  Stanley,  any  more 
than  Matthew  Arnold,  ever  became  a  world- 
ling in  the  ordinary  sense.  But  "the  world" 
asks  too  much  of  such  men  as  Stanley.  It 
heaps  all  its  honors  and  all  its  tasks  upon 
them,  and  without  some  slight  stiffening  of 
its  substance  the  exquisite  instrument  can- 
not meet  the  strain. 

Mr.  Hughes  always  strongly  denied  that 
the  George  Arthur  of  Tom  Brown's  Schooldays 
had  anything  whatever  to  do  with  Arthur 
Stanley.  But  I  should  like  to  believe  that 
some  anecdote  of  Stanley's  schooldays  had 
entered  at  least  into  the  well-known  scene 
where  Arthur,  in  class,  breaks  down  in  con- 
struing the  last  address  of  Helen  to  the  dead 
Hector.  Stanley's  memory,  indeed,  was  alive 
with  the  great  things  or  the  picturesque  de- 
tail of  literature  and  history,  no  less  than 
with  the  humorous  or  striking  things  of  con- 
temporary life.  I  remember  an  amusing  in- 
stance of  it  at  my  own  wedding  breakfast. 
Stanley  married  us,  and  a  few  days  before 
he  had  buried  Frederick  Denison  Maurice. 
His  historical  sense  was  pleased  by  the 

126 


THE    FRIENDS   OF   FOX   HOW 

juxtaposition  of  the  two  names  Maurice  and 
Arnold,  suggested  by  the  funeral  of  Maurice 
and  the  marriage  of  Arnold's  granddaughter. 
The  consequence  was  that  his  speech  at  the 
wedding  breakfast  was  quite  as  much  con- 
cerned with  "  graves  and  worms  and  epi- 
taphs" as  with  things  hymeneal.  But  from 
"the  little  Dean"  all  things  were  welcome. 
My  personal  memory  of  him  goes  back  to 
much  earlier  days.  As  a  child  at  Fox  How, 
he  roused  in  me  a  mingled  fascination  and 
terror.  To  listen  to  him  quoting  Shakspeare 
or  Scott  or  Macaulay  was  fascination;  to 
find  his  eye  fixed  on  one,  and  his  slender 
finger  darting  toward  one,  as  he  asked  a 
sudden  historical  question — "  Where  did  Ed- 
ward the  First  die?" —"Where  was  the 
Black  Prince  buried?" — was  terror,  lest,  at 
seven  years  old,  one  should  not  be  able  to 
play  up.  I  remember  a  particular  visit  of  his 
to  Fox  How,  when  the  dates  and  places  of 
these  royal  deaths  and  burials  kept  us — my- 
self in  particular — in  a  perpetual  ferment. 
It  must,  I  think,  have  been  when  he  was  still 
at  Canterbury,  investigating,  almost  with  the 
zest  and  passion  of  the  explorer  of  Troy  or 
Mycenae,  what  bones  lie  hid,  and  where, 
under  the  Cathedral  floor,  what  sands — 
"fallen  from  the  ruined  sides  of  Kings" — 
that  this  passion  of  deaths  and  dates  was 

127 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

upon  him.  I  can  see  myself  as  a  child  of 
seven  or  eight,  standing  outside  the  drawing- 
room  door  at  Fox  How,  bracing  myself  in  a 
mixture  of  delight  and  fear,  as  to  what  "Doc- 
tor Stanley"  might  ask  me  when  the  door 
was  opened;  then  the  opening,  and  the  sud- 
den sharp  turn  of  the  slight  figure,  writing 
letters  at  the  middle  table,  at  the  sight  of 
" little  Mary" — and  the  expected  thunder- 
bolt: 

"  Where  did  Henry  the  Fourth  die?" 

Confusion — and  blank  ignorance! 

But  memory  leaps  forward  to  a  day  four 
or  five  years  later,  when  my  father  and  I 
invaded  the  dark  high  room  in  the  old 
Deanery,  and  the  little  Dean  standing  at  his 
reading-desk.  He  looks  round — sees  "  Tom," 
and  the  child  with  him.  His  charming  face 
breaks  into  a  broad  smile;  he  remembers  in- 
stantly, though  it  is  some  years  since  he  and 
"little  Mary"  met.  He  holds  out  both  his 
hands  to  the  little  girl — 

"Come  and  see  the  place  where  Henry  the 
Fourth  died!" 

And  off  we  ran  together  to  the  Jerusalem 
Chamber. 


CHAPTER  VI 

YOUNG   DAYS   AT   OXFORD 


LJOW  little  those  who  are  school-girls  of 
*•  *•  to-day  can  realize  what  it  was  to  be  a 
school-girl  in  the  fifties  or  the  early  sixties  of 
the  last  century!  A  modern  girls'  school, 
equipped  as  scores  are  now  equipped  through- 
out the  country,  was  of  course  not  to  be  found 
in  1858,  when  I  first  became  a  school  boarder, 
or  in  1867,  when  I  ceased  to  be  one.  The 
games,  the  gymnastics,  the  solid  grounding 
in  drawing  and  music,  together  with  the 
enormously  improved  teaching  in  elementary 
science,  or  literature  and  language,  which 
are  at  the  service  of  the  school-girl  of  to-day, 
had  not  begun  to  be  when  I  was  at  school. 
As  far  as  intellectual  training  was  concerned, 
my  nine  years  from  seven  to  sixteen  were 
practically  wasted.  I  learned  nothing  thor- 
oughly or  accurately,  and  the  German, 
French,  and  Latin  which  I  soon  discovered 
after  my  marriage  to  be  essential  to  the  kind 
of  literary  work  I  wanted  to  do,  had  all  to 
be  relearned  before  they  could  be  of  any  real 
use  to  me;  nor  was  it  ever  possible  for  me — 

129 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

who  married  at  twenty — to  get  that  firm 
hold  on  the  structure  and  literary  history  of 
any  language,  ancient  or  modern,  which  my 
brother  William,  only  fifteen  months  my 
junior,  got  from  his  six  years  at  Rugby,  and 
his  training  there  in  Latin  and  Greek. 
What  I  learned  during  those  years  was 
learned  from  personalities;  from  contact 
with  a  nature  so  simple,  sincere,  and  strong 
as  that  of  Miss  Clough;  from  the  kindly  old 
German  governess,  whose  affection  for  me 
helped  me  through  some  rather  hard  and 
lonely  school -years  spent  at  a  school  in 
Shropshire;  and  from  a  gentle  and  high- 
minded  woman,  an  ardent  Evangelical,  with 
whom,  a  little  later,  at  the  age  of  fourteen  or 
fifteen,  I  fell  headlong  in  love,  as  was  the  man- 
ner of  school-girls  then,  and  is,  I  understand, 
frequently  the  case  with  school-girls  now,  in 
spite  of  the  greatly  increased  variety  of  sub- 
jects on  which  they  may  spend  their  minds. 
English  girls'  schools  to-day  providing  the 
higher  education  are,  so  far  as  my  knowledge 
goes,  worthily  representative  of  that  aston- 
ishing rise  in  the  intellectual  standards  of 
women  which  has  taken  place  in  the  last  half- 
century.  They  are  almost  entirely  taught 
by  women,  and  women  with  whom,  in  many 
cases,  education — the  shaping  of  the  imma- 
ture human  creature  to  noble  ends — is  the 

130 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT    OXFORD 

sincerest  of  passions;  who  find,  indeed,  in 
the  task  that  same  creative  joy  which  belongs 
to  literature  or  art,  or  philanthropic  experi- 
ment. The  schoolmistress  to  whom  money 
is  the  sole  or  even  the  chief  motive  of  her 
work,  is,  in  my  experience,  rare  to-day, 
though  we  have  all  in  our  time  heard  tales  of 
modern  "academies"  of  the  Miss  Pinkerton 
type,  brought  up  to  date — fashionable,  ex- 
clusive, and  luxurious — where,  as  in  some 
boys'  preparatory  schools  (before  the  war!) 
the  more  the  parents  paid,  the  better  they 
were  pleased.  But  I  have  not  come  across 
them.  The  leading  boarding-schools  in  Eng- 
land and  America,  at  present,  no  less  than 
the  excellent  day-schools  for  girls  of  the 
middle  class,  with  which  this  country  has 
been  covered  since  1870,  are  genuine  products 
of  that  Women's  Movement,  as  we  vaguely 
call  it,  in  the  early  educational  phases  of 
which  I  myself  was  much  engaged;  whereof 
the  results  are  now  widely  apparent,  though 
as  yet  only  half -grown.  If  one  tracks  it  back 
to  somewhere  near  its  origins,  its  superficial 
orgins,  at  any  rate,  one  is  brought  up,  I 
think,  as  in  the  case  of  so  much  else,  against 
one  leading  cause — railways!  With  railways 
and  a  cheap  press,  in  the  second  third  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  there  came  in,  as  we  all 
know,  the  break-up  of  a  thousand  mental 

10  131 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

stagnations,  answering  to  the  old  physical 
disabilities  and  inconveniences.  And  the 
break-up  has  nowhere  had  more  startling 
results  than  in  the  world  of  women,  and  the 
training  of  women  for  life.  We  have  only 
to  ask  ourselves  what  the  women  of  Ben- 
jamin Constant,  or  of  Beyle,  or  Balzac, 
would  have  made  of  the  keen  school-girl  and 
college  girl  of  the  present  day,  to  feel  how 
vast  is  the  change  through  which  some  of  us 
have  lived.  Exceptional  women,  of  course, 
have  led  much  the  same  kind  of  lives  in  all 
generations.  Mrs.  Sidney  Webb  has  gone 
through  a  very  different  sort  of  self-educa- 
tion from  that  of  Harriet  Martineau;  but 
she  has  not  thought  more  widely,  and  she 
will  hardly  influence  her  world  so  much 
as  that  stanch  fighter  of  the  past.  It  is 
the  rank  and  file — the  average  woman — for 
whom  the  world  has  opened  up  so  astonish- 
ingly. The  revelation  of  her  wide-spread  and 
various  capacity  that  the  present  war  has 
brought  about  is  only  the  suddenly  con- 
spicuous result  of  the  liberating  forces  set 
in  action  by  the  scientific  and  mechanical 
development  of  the  nineteenth  century.  It 
rests  still  with  that  world  "after  the  war," 
to  which  we  are  all  looking  forward  with 
mingled  hope  and  fear,  to  determine  the  new 
forms,  sociological  and  political,  through 

132 


YOUNG    DAYS   AT   OXFORD 

which  this  capacity,  this  heightened  faculty, 
must  some  day  organically  express  itself. 

In  the  years  when  I  was  at  school,  however 
— 1858  to  1867 — these  good  days  were  only 
beginning  to  dawn.  Poor  teaching,  poor 
school-books,  and,  in  many  cases,  indifferent 
food  and  much  ignorance  as  to  the  physical 
care  of  girls — these  things  were  common  in 
my  school-time.  I  loved  nearly  all  my 
teachers;  but  it  was  not  till  I  went  home  to 
live  at  Oxford,  in  1867,  that  I  awoke  intel- 
lectually to  a  hundred  interests  and  influences 
that  begin  much  earlier  nowadays  to  affect 
any  clever  child.  I  had  few  tools  and  little 
grounding;  and  I  was  much  more  childish 
than  I  need  have  been.  A  few  vivid  impres- 
sions stand  out  from  these  years:  the  great 
and  to  me  mysterious  figure  of  Newman 
haunting  the  streets  of  Edgbaston,  where,  in 
1861,  my  father  became  head  classical  master 
of  the  Oratory  School;  the  news  of  the  mur- 
der of  Lincoln,  coming  suddenly  into  a  quiet 
garden  in  a  suburb  of  Birmingham,  and  an 
ineffaceable  memory  of  the  pale  faces  and 
horror-stricken  looks  of  those  discussing  it; 
the  haunting  beauty  of  certain  passages 
of  Ruskin  which  I  copied  out  and  carried 
about  with  me,  without  in  the  least  caring 
to  read  as  a  whole  the  books  from  which  they 
came;  my  first  visit  to  the  House  of  Com- 

133 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

mons  in  1863;  the  recurrent  visits  to  Fox 
How,  and  the  winter  and  summer  beauty  of 
the  fells;  together  with  an  endless  story- 
telling phase  in  which  I  told  stories  to  my 
school-fellows,  on  condition  they  told  stories 
to  me;  coupled  with  many  attempts  on  my 
part  at  poetry  and  fiction,  which  make  me 
laugh  and  blush  when  I  compare  them  to-day 
with  similar  efforts  of  my  own  grandchildren. 
But  on  the  whole  they  were  starved  and 
rather  unhappy  years;  through  no  one's 
fault.  My  parents  were  very  poor  and  per- 
petually in  movement.  Everybody  did  the 
best  he  could. 

With  Oxford,  however,  and  my  seven- 
teenth year,  came  a  radical  change. 

It  was  in  July,  1865,  while  I  was  still  a 
school-girl,  that  in  the  very  middle  of  the 
Long  Vacation  I  first  saw  Oxford.  My 
father,  after  some  five  years  as  Doctor  New- 
man's colleague  at  the  Oratory  School,  had 
then  become  the  subject  of  a  strong  tem- 
porary reaction  against  Catholicism.  He 
left  the  Roman  Church  in  1865,  to  return 
to  it  again,  for  good,  eleven  years  later. 
During  the  interval  he  took  pupils  at  Oxford, 
produced  a  very  successful  Manual  of  English 
Literature,  edited  the  works  of  Wycliffe  for 
the  Clarendon  Press,  made  himself  an  Anglo- 

134 


YOUNG    DAYS   AT   OXFORD 

Saxon  scholar,  and  became  one  of  the  most 
learned  editors  of  the  great  Rolls  Series. 
To  look  at  the  endless  piles  of  his  note-books 
is  to  realize  how  hard,  how  incessantly  he 
worked.  Historical  scholarship  was  his  des- 
tined field;  he  found  his  happiness  in  it 
through  all  the  troubles  of  life.  And  the 
return  to  Oxford,  to  its  memories,  its  libraries, 
its  stately,  imperishable  beauty,  was  delight- 
ful to  him.  So  also,  I  think,  for  some  years, 
was  the  sense  of  intellectual  freedom.  Then 
began  a  kind  of  nostalgia,  which  grew  and 
grew  till  it  took  him  back  to  the  Catholic 
haven  in  1876,  never  to  wander  more. 

But  when  he  first  showed  me  Oxford  he 
was  in  the  ardor  of  what  seemed  a  permanent 
severance  from  an  admitted  mistake.  I  see 
a  deserted  Oxford  street,  and  a  hansom 
coming  up  it — myself  and  my  father  inside  it. 
I  was  returning  from  school,  for  the  holidays. 
When  I  had  last  seen  my  people,  they  were 
living  near  Birmingham.  I  now  found  them 
at  Oxford,  and  I  remember  the  thrill  of  ex- 
citement with  which  I  looked  from  side  to 
side  as  we  neared  the  colleges.  For  I  knew 
well,  even  at  fourteen,  that  this  was  "no 
mean  city."  As  we  drove  up  Beaumont 
Street  we  saw  what  was  then  "new  Balliol" 
in  front  of  us,  and  a  jutting  window.  "There 
lives  the  arch-heretic!"  said  my  father.  It 

135 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

was  a  window  in  Mr.  Jowett's  rooms.  He 
was  not  yet  Master  of  the  famous  College, 
but  his  name  was  a  rallying-cry,  and  his  per- 
sonal influence  almost  at  its  zenith.  At  the 
same  time,  he  was  then  rigorously  excluded 
from  the  University  pulpit;  it  was  not  till 
a  year  later  that  even  his  close  friend  Dean 
Stanley  ventured  to  ask  him  to  preach  in 
Westminster  Abbey;  and  his  salary  as 
Greek  Professor,  due  to  him  from  the 
revenues  of  Christ  Church,  and  withheld 
from  him  on  theological  grounds  for  years, 
had  only  just  been  wrung — at  last — from  the 
reluctant  hands  of  a  governing  body  which 
contained  Canon  Liddon  and  Doctor  Pusey. 

To  my  father,  on  his  settlement  in  Oxford, 
Jowett  had  been  a  kind  and  helpful  friend; 
he  had  a  very  quick  sympathy  with  my 
mother;  and  as  I  grew  up  he  became  my 
friend,  too,  so  that  as  I  look  back  upon  my 
Oxford  years  both  before  and  after  my  mar- 
riage, the  dear  Master — he  became  Master  in 
1870— plays  a  very  marked  part  in  the  Ox- 
ford scene  as  I  shall  ever  remember  it. 

It  was  not,  however,  till  two  years  later 
that  I  left  school,  and  slipped  into  the  Oxford 
life  as  a  fish  into  water.  I  was  sixteen,  be- 
ginning to  be  conscious  of  all  sorts  of  rising 
needs  and  ambitions,  keenly  alive  to  the 
spell  of  Oxford  and  to  the  good  fortune  which 

136 


YOUNG   DAYS   AT   OXFORD 

had  brought  me  to  live  in  her  streets.  There 
was  in  me,  I  think,  a  real  hunger  to  learn, 
and  a  very  quick  sense  of  romance  in  things 
or  people.  But  after  sixteen,  except  in  music, 
I  had  no  definite  teaching,  and  everything  I 
learned  came  to  me  from  persons — and  books 
—sporadically,  without  any  general  guidance 
or  plan.  It  was  all  a  great  voyage  of  dis- 
covery, organized  mainly  by  myself,  on  the 
advice  of  a  few  men  and  women  very  much 
older,  who  took  an  interest  in  me  and  were 
endlessly  kind  to  the  shy  and  shapeless 
creature  I  must  have  been. 

It  was  in  1868  or  1869—1  think  I  was 
seventeen — that  I  remember  my  first  sight 
of  a  college  garden  lying  cool  and  shaded 
between  gray  college  walls,  and  on  the  grass 
a  figure  that  held  me  fascinated — a  lady  in  a 
green  brocade  dress,  with  a  belt  and  chate- 
laine of  Russian  silver,  who  was  playing 
croquet,  then  a  novelty  in  Oxford,  and 
seemed  to  me,  as  I  watched  her,  a  perfect 
model  of  grace  and  vivacity.  A  man  nearly 
thirty  years  older  than  herself,  whom  I  knew 
to  be  her  husband,  was  standing  near  her, 
and  a  handful  of  undergraduates  made  an 
amused  and  admiring  court  round  the  lady. 
The  elderly  man — he  was  then  fifty-three — 
was  Mark  Pattison,  Rector  of  Lincoln  Col- 
lege, and  the  croquet-player  had  been  his 

137 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

wife  about  seven  years.  After  the  Rector's 
death  in  1884,  Mrs.  Pattison  married  Sir 
Charles  Dilke  in  the  very  midst  of  the 
divorce  proceedings  which  were  to  wreck  in 
full  stream  a  brilliant  political  career;  and 
she  showed  him  a  proud  devotion  till  her 
death  in  1904.  None  of  her  early  friends 
who  remember  her  later  history  can  ever 
think  of  the  " Frances  Pattison"  of  Oxford 
days  without  a  strange  stirring  of  heart.  I 
was  much  at  Lincoln  in  the  years  before  I 
married,  and  derived  an  impression  from  the 
life  lived  there  that  has  never  left  me.  After- 
ward I  saw  much  less  of  Mrs.  Pattison,  who 
was  generally  on  the  Riviera  in  the  winter; 
but  from  1868  to  1872,  the  Rector,  learned, 
critical,  bitter,  fastidious,  and  "Mrs.  Pat," 
with  her  gaiety,  her  picturesqueness,  her 
impatience  of  the  Oxford  solemnities  and 
decorums,  her  sharp,  restless  wit,  her  deter- 
mination not  to  be  academic,  to  hold  on  to 
the'greater  world  of  affairs  outside — mattered 
more  to  me  perhaps  than  anybody  else. 
They  were  very  good  to  me,  and  I  was  never 
tired  of  going  there;  though  I  was  much 
puzzled  by  their  ways,  and — while  my  Evan- 
gelical phase  lasted — much  scandalized  often 
by  the  speculative  freedom  of  the  talk  I 
heard.  Sometimes  my  rather  uneasy  con- 
science protested  in  ways  which  I  think  must 

138 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT    OXFORD 

have  amused  my  hosts,  though  they  never 
said  a  word.  They  were  fond  of  asking  me 
to  come  to  supper  at  Lincoln  on  Sundays. 
It  was  a  gay,  unceremonious  meal,  at  which 
Mrs.  Pattison  appeared  in  the  kind  of  gown 
which  at  a  much  later  date  began  to  be  called 
a  tea-gown.  It  was  generally  white  or  gray, 
with  various  ornaments  and  accessories  which 
always  seemed  to  me,  accustomed  for  so  long 
to  the  rough-and-tumble  of  school  life,  mar- 
vels of  delicacy  and  prettiness;  so  that  I  was 
sharply  conscious,  on  these  occasions,  of  the 
graceful  figure  made  by  the  young  mistress 
of  the  old  house.  But  some  last  stubborn 
trace  in  me  of  the  Evangelical  view  of  Sunday 
declared  that  while  one  might  talk — and  one 
must  eat! — on  Sunday,  one  mustn't  put  on 
evening  dress,  or  behave  as  though  it  were 
just  like  a  week-day.  So  while  every  one 
else  was  in  evening  dress,  I  more  than  once— 
at  seventeen — came  to  these  Sunday  gather- 
ings on  a  winter  evening,  purposely,  in  a 
high  woolen  frock,  sternly  but  uncomfortably 
conscious  of  being  sublime — if  only  one  were 
not  ridiculous!  The  Rector,  "Mrs.  Pat," 
Mr.  Bywater,  myself,  and  perhaps  a  couple 
of  undergraduates — often  a  bewildered  and 
silent  couple — I  see  that  little  vanished  com- 
pany in  the  far  past  so  plainly!  Three  of 
them  are  dead — and  for  me  the  gray  walls 

139 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

of  Lincoln  must  always  be  haunted  by  their 
ghosts. 

The  historian  of  French  painting  and 
French  decorative  art  was  already  in  those 
days  unfolding  in  Mrs.  Pattison.  Her  draw- 
ing-room was  French,  sparely  furnished  with 
a  few  old  girandoles  and  mirrors  on  its  white 
paneled  walls,  and  a  Persian  carpet  with  a 
black  center,  on  which  both  the  French 
furniture  and  the  living  inmates  of  the  room 
looked  their  best.  And  up-stairs,  in  "Mrs. 
Pat's"  own  working-room,  there  were  in- 
numerable things  that  stirred  my  curiosity — 
old  French  drawings  and  engravings,  masses 
of  foreign  books  that  showed  the  young  and 
brilliant  owner  of  the  room  to  be  already  a 
scholar,  even  as  her  husband  counted  scholar- 
ship; together  with  the  tools  and  materials 
for  etching,  a  mysterious  process  in  which 
I  was  occasionally  allowed  to  lend  a  hand, 
and  which,  as  often  as  not,  during  the  appli- 
cation of  the  acid  to  the  plate,  ended  in  dire 
misfortune  to  the  etcher's  fingers  or  dress, 
and  in  the  helpless  laughter  of  both  artist 
and  assistant. 

The  Rector  himself  was  an  endless  study  to 
me — he  and  his  frequent  companion,  In- 
gram Bywater,  afterward  the  distinguished 
Greek  Professor.  To  listen  to  these  two 
friends  as  they  talked  of  foreign  scholars  in 

140 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT    OXFORD 

Paris  or  Germany,  of  Renan,  or  Ranke,  or 
Curtius;  as  they  poured  scorn  on  Oxford 
scholarship,  or  the  lack  of  it,  and  on  the  ideals 
of  Balliol,  which  aimed  at  turning  out  public 
officials,  as  compared  with  the  researching 
ideals  of  the  German  universities,  which 
seemed  to  the  Rector  the  only  ideals  worth 
calling  academic;  or  as  they  flung  gibes  at 
Christ  Church,  whence  Pusey  and  Liddon  still 
directed  the  powerful  Church  party  of  the 
University — was  to  watch  the  doors  of  new 
worlds  gradually  opening  before  a  girl's 
questioning  intelligence.  The  Rector  would 
walk  up  and  down,  occasionally  taking  a 
book  from  his  crowded  shelves,  while  Mr. 
Bywater  and  Mrs.  Pattison  smoked,  with  the 
after-luncheon  coffee — and  in  those  days  a 
woman  with  a  cigarette  was  a  rarity  in 
England — and  sometimes,  at  a  caustic  mot 
of  the  former's  there  would  break  out  the 
Rector's  cackling  laugh,  which  was  ugly,  no 
doubt,  but,  when  he  was  amused  and  at  ease, 
extraordinarily  full  of  mirth.  To  me  he  was 
from  the  beginning  the  kindest  friend.  He 
saw  that  I  came  of  a  literary  stock  and  had 
literary  ambitions;  and  he  tried  to  direct  me. 
"Get  to  the  bottom  of  something, "  he  would 
say.  "Choose  a  subject,  and  know  every- 
thing about  it!"  I  eagerly  followed  his  ad- 
vice, and  began  to  work  at  early  Spanish 

141 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

in  the  Bodleian.  But  I  think  he  was  wrong— 
I  venture  to  think  so! — though,  as  his  half- 
melancholy,  half-satirical  look  comes  back 
to  me,  I  realize  how  easily  he  would  defend 
himself,  if  one  could  tell  him  so  now.  I 
think  I  ought  to  have  been  told  to  take  a 
history  examination  and  learn  Latin  properly. 
But  if  I  had,  half  the  exploring  joy  of  those 
early  years  would,  no  doubt,  have  been  cut 
away. 

Later  on,  in  the  winters  when  Mrs.  Patti- 
son,  threatened  with  rheumatic  gout,  disap- 
peared to  the  Riviera,  I  came  to  know  a 
sadder  and  lonelier  Rector.  I  used  to  go  to 
tea  with  him  then  in  his  own  book-lined 
sanctum,  and  we  mended  the  blazing  fire 
between  us  and  talked  endlessly.  Presently 
I  married,  and  his  interest  in  me  changed; 
though  our  friendship  never  lessened,  and  I 
shall  always  remember  with  emotion  my 
last  sight  of  him  lying,  a  white  and  dying  man, 
on  his  sofa  in  London — the  clasp  of  the 
wasted  hand,  the  sad,  haunting  eyes.  When 
his  Memoirs  appeared,  after  his  death,  a  book 
of  which  Mr.  Gladstone  once  said  to  me  that 
he  reckoned  it  as  among  the  most  tragic  and 
the  most  memorable  books  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  I  understood  him  more  clearly  and 
more  tenderly  than  I  could  have  done  as  a 
girl.  Particularly,  I  understood  why  in  that 

142 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT   OXFORD 

skeptical  and  agnostic  talk  which  never 
spared  the  Anglican  ecclesiastics  of  the  mo- 
ment, or  such  a  later  Catholic  convert  as 
Manning,  I  cannot  remember  that  I  ever 
heard  him  mention  the  great  name  of  John 
Henry  Newman  with  the  slightest  touch  of 
disrespect.  On  the  other  hand,  I  once  saw 
him  receive  a  message  that  some  friend 
brought  him  from  Newman  with  an  eager 
look  and  a  start  of  pleasure.  He  had  been 
a  follower  of  Newman's  in  the  Tractarian 
days,  and  no  one  who  ever  came  near  to 
Newman  could  afterward  lightly  speak  ill 
of  him.  It  was  Stanley,  and  not  the  Rector, 
indeed,  who  said  of  the  famous  Oratorian 
that  the  whole  course  of  English  religious 
history  might  have  been  different  if  Newman 
had  known  German.  But  Pattison  might 
have  said  it,  and  if  he  had  it  would  have 
been  without  the  smallest  bitterness  as  the 
mere  expression  of  a  sober  and  indisputable 
truth.  Alas ! — merely  to  quote  it,  nowadays, 
carries  one  back  to  a  Germany  before  the 
Flood — a  Germany  of  small  States,  a  land  of 
scholars  and  thinkers;  a  Germany  that  would 
surely  have  recoiled  in  horror  from  any 
prevision  of  that  deep  and  hideous  abyss 
which  her  descendants,  maddened  by  wealth 
and  success,  were  one  day  to  dig  between 
themselves  and  the  rest  of  Europe. 

143 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

One  of  my  clearest  memories  connected 
with  the  Pattisons  and  Lincoln  is  that  of 
meeting  George  Eliot  and  Mr.  Lewes  there, 
in  the  spring  of  1870,  when  I  was  eighteen. 
It  was  at  one  of  the  Sunday  suppers.  George 
Eliot  sat  at  the  Rector's  right  hand.  I  was 
opposite  her;  on  my  left  was  George  Henry 
Lewes,  to  whom  I  took  a  prompt  and  active 
dislike.  He  and  Mrs.  Pattison  kept  up  a 
lively  conversation  in  which  Mr.  Bywater, 
on  the  other  side  of  the  table,  played  full 
part.  George  Eliot  talked  very  little,  and  I 
not  at  all.  The  Rector  was  shy  or  tired,  and 
George  Eliot  was  in  truth  entirely  occupied 
in  watching  or  listening  to  Mrs.  Lewes.  I 
was  disappointed  that  she  was  so  silent,  and 
perhaps  her  quick  eye  may  have  divined  it, 
for,  after  supper,  as  we  were  going  up  the 
interesting  old  staircase,  made  in  the  thick- 
ness of  the  wall,  which  led  direct  from  the 
dining-room  to  the  drawing-room  above,  she 
said  to  me:  "The  Rector  tells  me  that  you 
have  been  reading  a  good  deal  about  Spain. 
Would  you  care  to  hear  something  of  our 
Spanish  journey?" — the  journey  which  had 
preceded  the  appearance  of  The  Spanish 
Gypsy,  then  newly  published.  My  reply  is 
easily  imagined.  The  rest  of  the  party 
passed  through  the  dimly  lit  drawing-room 
to  -talk  and  smoke  in  the  gallery  beyond. 

144 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT   OXFORD 

George  Eliot  sat  down  in  the  darkness,  and 
I  beside  her.  Then  she  talked  for  about 
twenty  minutes,  with  perfect  ease  and  finish, 
without  misplacing  a  word  or  dropping  a 
sentence,  and  I  realized  at  last  that  I  was  in 
the  presence  of  a  great  writer.  Not  a  great 
talker.  It  is  clear  that  George  Eliot  never 
was  that.  Impossible  for  her  to  "talk"  her 
books,  or  evolve  her  books  from  conversation, 
like  Madame  de  Stael.  She  was  too  self- 
conscious,  too  desperately  reflective,  too  rich 
in  second-thoughts  for  that.  But  in  tete-a- 
tete,  and  with  time  to  choose  her  words,  she 
could — in  monologue,  with  just  enough  stim- 
ulus from  a  companion  to  keep  it  going — 
produce  on  a  listener  exactly  the  impression 
of  some  of  her  best  work.  As  the  low,  clear 
voice  flowed  on  in  Mrs.  Pattison's  drawing- 
room,  I  saw  Saragossa,  Granada,  the  Escorial, 
and  that  survival  of  the  old  Europe  in  the 
new,  which  one  must  go  to  Spain  to  find. 
Not  that  the  description  was  particularly 
vivid — in  talking  of  famous  places  John 
Richard  Green  could  make  words  tell  and 
paint  with  far  greater  success;  but  it 
was  singularly  complete  and  accomplished. 
When  it  was  done  the  effect  was  there — the 
effect  she  had  meant  to  produce.  I  shut 
my  eyes,  and  it  all  comes  back — the  dark- 
ened room,  the  long,  pallid  face,  set  in  black 

145 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

lace,  the  evident  wish  to  be  kind  to  a  young 
girl. 

Two  more  impressions  of  her  let  me  record. 
The  following  day,  the  Pattisons  took  their 
guests  to  see  the  "eights"  races  from  Christ 
Church  meadow.  A  young  Fellow  of  Mer- 
ton,  Mandell  Creighton,  afterward  the  be- 
loved and  famous  Bishop  of  London,  was 
among  those  entertaining  her  on  the  barge, 
and  on  the  way  home  he  took  her  and  Mr. 
Lewes  through  Merton  garden.  I  was  of  the 
party,  and  I  remember  what  a  carnival  of 
early  summer  it  was  in  that  enchanting  place. 
The  chestnuts  were  all  out,  one  splendor 
from  top  to  toe;  the  laburnums;  the  lilacs; 
the  hawthorns,  red  and  white;  the  new- 
mown  grass  spreading  its  smooth  and  silky 
carpet  round  the  college  walls;  a  May  sky 
overhead,  and  through  the  trees  glimpses  of 
towers  and  spires,  silver  gray,  in  the  sparkling 
summer  air — the  picture  was  one  of  those 
that  Oxford  throws  before  the  spectator  at 
every  turn,  like  the  careless  beauty  that 
knows  she  has  only  to  show  herself,  to  move, 
to  breathe,  to  give  delight.  George  Eliot 
stood  on  the  grass,  in  the  bright  sun,  looking 
at  the  flower-laden  chestnuts,  at  the  distant 
glimpses  on  all  sides,  of  the  surrounding  city, 
saying  little — that  she  left  to  Mr.  Lewes! — 
but  drinking  it  in,  storing  it  in  that  rich, 

146 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT   OXFORD 

absorbent  mind  of  hers.  And  afterward 
when  Mr.  Lewes,  Mr.  Creighton,  she,  and  I 
walked  back  to  Lincoln,  I  remember  another 
little  incident  throwing  light  on  the  ever- 
ready  instinct  of  the  novelist.  As  we  turned 
into  the  quadrangle  of  Lincoln — suddenly,  at 
one  of  the  upper  windows  of  the  Rector's 
lodgings,  which  occupied  the  far  right-hand 
corner  of  the  quad,  there  appeared  the  head 
and  shoulders  of  Mrs.  Pattison,  as  she 
looked  out  and  beckoned,  smiling,  to  Mrs. 
Lewes.  It  was  a  brilliant  apparition,  as 
though  a  French  portrait  by  Greuze  or 
Perronneau  had  suddenly  slipped  into  a 
vacant  space  in  the  old  college  wall.  The 
pale,  pretty  head,  blond-cendree;  the  delicate, 
smiling  features  and  white  throat;  a  touch 
of  black,  a  touch  of  blue;  a  white  dress;  a 
general  eighteenth-century  impression  as 
though  of  powder  and  patches — Mrs.  Lewes 
perceived  it  in  a  flash,  and  I  saw  her  run 
eagerly  to  Mr.  Lewes  and  draw  his  attention 
to  the  window  and  its  occupant.  She  took 
his  arm,  while  she  looked  and  waved.  If  she 
had  lived  longer,  some  day,  and  somewhere 
in  her  books,  that  vision  at  the  window  and 
that  flower-laden  garden  would  have  re- 
appeared. I  seemed  to  see  her  consciously 
and  deliberately  committing  them  both  to 
memory. 

11  147 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

But  I  do  not  believe  that  she  ever  meant 
to  describe  the  Rector  in  "Mr.  Casaubon." 
She  was  far  too  good  a  scholar  herself  to 
have  perpetrated  a  caricature  so  flagrantly 
untrue.  She  knew  Mark  Pattison's  quality, 
and  could  never  have  meant  to  draw  the 
writer  of  some  of  the  most  fruitful  and  illu- 
minating of  English  essays,  and  one  of  the 
most  brilliant  pieces  of  European  biography, 
in  the  dreary  and  foolish  pedant  who  over- 
shadows Middlemarch.  But  the  fact  that 
Mark  Pattison  was  an  elderly  scholar  with  a 
young  wife,  and  that  George  Eliot  knew  him, 
led  later  on  to  a  legend  which  was,  I  am  sure, 
unwelcome  to  the  writer  of  Middlemarch, 
while  her  supposed  victim  passed  it  by  with 
amused  indifference. 

As  to  the  relation  between  the  Rector  and 
the  Squire  of  Robert  Elsmere  which  has  been 
often  assumed,  it  was  confined,  as  I  have 
already  said  (in  the  introduction  to  the 
library  edition  of  Robert  Elsmere  published 
in  1909),  to  a  likeness  in  outward  aspect — "a 
few  personal  traits,  and  the  two  main  facts 
of  great  learning  and  a  general  impatience  of 
fools."  If  one  could  imagine  Mark  Pattison 
a  landowner,  he  would  certainly  never  have 
neglected  his  estates,  or  tolerated  an  ineffi- 
cient agent. 

Only  three  years  intervened  between  my 

148 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT   OXFORD 

leaving  school  and  my  engagement  to  Mr. 
T.  Humphry  Ward,  Fellow  and  Tutor  of 
Brasenose  College,  Oxford.  But  those  three 
years  seem  to  me  now  to  have  been  extraor- 
dinarily full.  Lincoln  and  the  Pattisons, 
Balliol  and  Mr.  Jowett,  and  the  Bodleian 
Library,  outside  the  influences  and  affections 
of  my  own  home,  stand  in  the  forefront  of 
what  memory  looks  back  on  as  a  broad  and 
animated  scene.  The  great  Library,  in  par- 
ticular, became  to  me  a  living  and  inspiring 
presence.  When  I  think  of  it  as  it  then 
was,  I  am,  aware  of  a  medley  of  beautiful 
things — pale  sunlight  on  book-lined  walls,  or 
streaming  through  old  armorial  bearings  on 
Tudor  windows;  spaces  and  distances,  all 
books,  beneath  a  painted  roof  from  which 
gleamed  the  motto  of  the  University— 
Dominus  illuminatio  mea;  gowned  figures 
moving  silently  about  the  spaces;  the  faint 
scents  of  old  leather  and  polished  wood; 
and  fusing  it  all,  a  stately  dignity  and  be- 
nignant charm,  through  which  the  voices  of 
the  bells  outside,  as  they  struck  each  succes- 
sive quarter  from  Oxford's  many  towers, 
seemed  to  breathe  a  certain  eternal  reminder 
of  the  past  and  the  dead. 

But  regions  of  the  Bodleian  were  open  to 
me  then  that  no  ordinary  reader  sees  now. 
Mr.  Coxe — the  well-known,  much-loved 

149 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

Bodley's  Librarian  of  those  days — took 
kindly  notice  of  the  girl  reader,  and  very 
soon,  probably  on  the  recommendation  of 
Mark  Pattison,  who  was  a  Curator,  made  me 
free  of  the  lower  floors,  where  was  the 
"Spanish  room,"  with  its  shelves  of  seven- 
teenth and  eighteenth  century  volumes  in 
sheepskin  or  vellum,  with  their  turned-in 
edges  and  leathern  strings.  Here  I  might 
wander  at  will,  absolutely  alone,  save  for  the 
visit  of  an  occasional  librarian  from  the 
upper  floor,  seeking  a  book.  To  get  to  the 
Spanish  Room  one  had  to  pass  through  the 
Douce  Library,  the  home  of  treasures  beyond 
price;  on  one  side  half  the  precious  things  of 
Renaissance  printing,  French  or  Italian  or 
Elizabethan;  on  the  other,  stands  of  il- 
luminated Missals  and  Hour  Books,  many  of 
them  rich  in  pictures  and  flower-work,  that 
shone  like  jewels  in  the  golden  light  of  the 
room.  That  light  was  to  me  something 
tangible  and  friendly.  It  seemed  to  be  the 
mingled  product  of  all  the  delicate  browns 
and  yellows  and  golds  in  the  bindings  of  the 
books,  of  the  brass  lattice-work  that  cov- 
ered them,  and  of  reflections  from  the  beau- 
tiful stone-work  of  the  Schools  Quadrangle 
outside.  It  was  in  these  noble  surroundings 
that,  with  far  too  little,  I  fear,  of  positive 
reading,  and  with  much  undisciplined  wan- 

150 


YOUNG   DAYS   AT   OXFORD 

dering  from  shelf  to  shelf  and  subject  to 
subject,  there  yet  sank  deep  into  me  the 
sense  of  history,  and  of  that  vast  ocean  of 
the  recorded  past  from  which  the  generations 
rise  and  into  which  they  fall  back.  And 
that  in  itself  was  a  great  boon — almost,  one 
might  say,  a  training,  of  a  kind. 

But  a  girl  of  seventeen  is  not  always  think- 
ing of  books,  especially  in  the  Oxford  sum- 
mer term. 

In  Miss  Bretherton,  my  earliest  novel,  and 
in  Lady  Connie,  so  far  my  latest,1  will  be 
found,  by  those  who  care  to  look  for  it,  the 
reflection  of  that  other  life  of  Oxford,  the 
life  which  takes  its  shape,  not  from  age,  but 
from  youth,  not  from  the  past  which  created 
Oxford,  but  from  the  lively,  laughing  present 
which  every  day  renews  it.  For  six  months 
of  the  year  Oxford  is  a  city  of  young  men, 
for  the  most  part  between  the  ages  of 
eighteen  and  twenty-two.  In  my  maiden 
days  it  was  not  also  a  city  of  young  women, 
as  it  is  to-day.  Women — girls  especially— 
were  comparatively  on  sufferance.  The 
Heads  of  Houses  were  married;  the  Pro- 
fessors were  mostly  married;  but  married 
tutors  had  scarcely  begun  to  be.  Only  at 
two  seasons  of  the  year  was  Oxford  invaded 

1  These   chapters   were   written   before   the   appearance   of 
Missing  in  the  autumn  of  1917. 

151 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

by  women — by  bevies  of  maidens  who  came, 
in  early  May  and  middle  June,  to  be  made 
much  of  by  their  brothers  and  their  brothers' 
friends,  to  be  danced  with  and  flirted  with, 
to  know  the  joys  of  coming  back  on  a  sum- 
mer night  from  Nuneham  up  the  long, 
fragrant  reaches  of  the  lower  river,  or  of 
" sitting  out"  in  historic  gardens  where 
Philip  Sidney  or  Charles  I  had  passed. 

At  the  "  eights "  and  "  Commem."  the  old, 
old  place  became  a  mere  background  for 
pretty  dresses  and  college  luncheons  and 
river  picnics.  The  seniors  groaned  often,  as 
well  they  might;  for  there  was  little  work 
done  in  my  day  in  the  summer  term.  But 
it  is  perhaps  worth  while  for  any  nation  to 
possess  such  harmless  festivals  in  so  beau- 
tiful a  setting  as  these  Oxford  gatherings. 
How  many  of  our  national  festivals  are 
spoiled  by  ugly  and  sordid  things — betting 
and  drink,  greed  and  display !  Here,  all  there 
is  to  see  is  a  competition  of  boats,  manned 
by  England's  best  youth,  upon  a  noble  river, 
flowing,  in  Virgilian  phrase,  "under  ancient 
walls";  a  city  of  romance,  given  up  for  a 
few  days  to  the  pleasure  of  the  young,  and 
breathing  into  that  pleasure  her  own  re- 
fining, exalting  note;  a  stately  ceremony— 
the  Encaenia — going  back  to  the  infancy 
of  English  learning;  and  the  dancing  of 

152 


YOUNG    DAYS   AT   OXFORD 

young  men  and  maidens  in  Gothic  or  classical 
halls  built  long  ago  by  the  "  fathers  who 
begat  us."  My  own  recollection  of  the 
Oxford  summer,  the  Oxford  river  and  hay- 
fields,  the  dawn  on  Oxford  streets,  as  one 
came  out  from  a  Commemoration  ball,  or 
the  evening  under  Nuneham  woods  where 
the  swans  on  that  still  water,  now,  as  always, 
" float  double,  swan  and  shadow" —these 
things  I  hope  will  be  with  me  to  the  end. 
To  have  lived  through  them  is  to  have  tasted 
youth  and  pleasure  from  a  cup  as  pure,  as 
little  alloyed  with  baser  things,  as  the  high 
gods  allow  to  mortals. 

Let  me  recall  one  more  experience  before  I 
come  to  the  married  life  which  began  in 
1872 — my  first  sight  of  Taine,  the  great 
French  historian,  in  the  spring  of  1871. 
He  had  come  over  at  the  invitation  of  the 
Curators  of  the  Taylorian  Institution  to 
give  a  series  of  lectures  on  Corneille  and 
Racine.  The  lectures  were  arranged  imme- 
diately after  the  surrender  of  Paris  to  the 
German  troops,  when  it  might  have  been 
hoped  that  the  worst  calamities  of  France 
were  over.  But  before  M.  Taine  crossed  to 
England  the  insurrection  of  the  Commune 
had  broken  out,  and  while  he  was  actually  in 
Oxford,  delivering  his  six  lectures,  the  terrible 
news  of  the  last  days  of  May,  the  burning 

153 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

of  the  Tuileries,  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  and  the 
Cour  des  Comptes,  all  the  savagery  of  the 
beaten  revolution,  let  loose  on  Paris  itself, 
came  crashing,  day  by  day  and  hour  by  hour, 
like  so  many  horrible  explosions  in  the  heavy 
air  of  Europe,  still  tremulous  with  the  mem- 
ories and  agonies  of  recent  war. 

How  well  I  remember  the  effect  in  Oxford ! 
— the  newspaper  cries  in  the  streets,  the  fear 
each  morning  as  to  what  new  calamities  might 
have  fallen  on  civilization,  the  intense  fellow- 
feeling  in  a  community  of  students  and  schol- 
ars for  the  students  and  scholars  of  France ! 

When  M.  Taine  arrived,  he  himself  bears 
witness  (see  his  published  Correspondence, 
Vol.  II)  that  Oxford  could  not  do  enough  to 
show  her  sympathy  with  a  distinguished 
Frenchman.  He  writes  from  Oxford  on 
May  25th: 

I  have  no  courage  for  a  letter  to-day.  I  have 
just  heard  of  the  horrors  of  Paris,  the  burning  of 
the  Louvre,  the  Tuileries,  the  Hotel  de  Ville,  etc. 
My  heart  is  wrung.  I  have  energy  for  nothing. 
I  cannot  go  out  and  see  people.  I  was  in  the 
Bodleian  when  the  Librarian  told  me  this  and 
showed  me  the  newspapers.  In  presence  of  such 
madness  and  such  disasters,  they  treat  a  French- 
man here  with  a  kind  of  pitying  sympathy. 

Oxford  residents,  indeed,  inside  and  out- 
side the  colleges,  crowded  the  first  lecture  to 

154 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT    OXFORD 

show  our  feeling  not  only  for  M.  Taine,  but 
for  a  France  wounded  and  trampled  on  by 
her  own  children.  The  few  dignified  and 
touching  words  with  which  he  opened  his 
course,  his  fine,  dark  head,  the  attractiveness 
of  his  subject,  the  lucidity  of  his  handling  of 
it,  made  the  lecture  a  great  success;  and  a 
few  nights  afterward  at  dinner  at  Balliol  I 
found  myself  sitting  next  the  great  man.  In 
his  published  Correspondence  there  is  a  letter 
describing  this  dinner  which  shows  that  I 
must  have  confided  in  him  not  a  little — as 
to  my  Bodleian  reading,  and  the  article  on  the 
' '  Poema  del  Cid ' '  that  I  was  writing.  He  con- 
fesses, however,  that  he  did  his  best  to  draw 
me — examining  the  English  girl  as  a  new 
specimen  for  his  psychological  collection. 
As  for  me,  I  can  only  perversely  remember  a 
passing  phrase  of  his  to  the  effect  that  there 
was  too  much  magenta  in  the  dress  of  Eng- 
lishwomen, and  too  much  pepper  in  the 
English  cuisine.  From  English  cooking — 
which  showed  ill  in  the  Oxford  of  those  days 
—he  suffered,  indeed,  a  good  deal.  Nor,  in 
spite  of  his  great  literary  knowledge  of  Eng- 
land and  English,  was  his  spoken  English 
clear  enough  to  enable  him  to  grapple  with 
the  lodging-house  cook.  Professor  Max  Mul- 
ler,  who  had  induced  him  to  give  the  lect- 
ures, and  watched  over  him  during  his  stay, 

155 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

told  me  that  on  his  first  visit  to  the  his- 
torian in  his  Beaumont  Street  rooms  he 
found  him  sitting  bewildered  before  the 
strangest  of  meals.  It  consisted  entirely  of 
a  huge  beefsteak,  served  in  the  unappetizing, 
slovenly  English  way,  and — a  large  plate  of 
buttered  toast.  Nothing  else.  "But  I  or- 
dered bif-tek  and  pott-a-toes !"  cried  the 
puzzled  historian  to  his  visitor! 

Another  guest  of  the  Master's  on  that  night 
was  Mr.  Swinburne,  and  of  him,  too,  I  have 
a  vivid  recollection  as  he  sat  opposite  to  me 
on  the  side  next  the  fire,  his  small  lower 
features  and  slender  neck  overweighted  by 
his  thick  reddish  hair  and  capacious  brow. 
I  could  not  think  why  he  seemed  so  cross  and 
uncomfortable.  He  was  perpetually  beck- 
oning to  the  waiters;  then,  when  they  came, 
holding  peremptory  conversation  with  them; 
while  I  from  my  side  of  the  table  could  see 
them  going  away,  with  a  whisper  or  a  shrug 
to  each  other,  like  men  asked  for  the  im- 
possible. At  last,  with  a  kind  of  bound, 
Swinburne  leaped  from  his  chair  and  seized 
a  copy  of  the  Times  which  he  seemed  to  have 
persuaded  one  of  the  men  to  bring  him. 
As  he  got  up  I  saw  that  the  fire  behind  him, 
and  very  close  to  him,  must  indeed  have 
been  burning  the  very  marrow  out  of  a  long- 
suffering  poet.  And,  alack!  in  that  house 

156 


YOUNG    DAYS   AT   OXFORD 

without  a  mistress  the  small  conveniences  of 
life,  such  as  fire-screens,  were  often  over- 
looked. The  Master  did  not  possess  any. 
In  a  pale  exasperation  Swinburne  folded  the 
Times  over  the  back  of  his  chair  and  sat 
down  again.  Vain  was  the  effort!  The 
room  was  narrow,  the  party  large,  and  the 
servants,  pushing  by,  had  soon  dislodged  the 
Times.  Again  and  again  did  Swinburne  in 
a  fury  replace  it;  and  was  soon  reduced  to 
sitting  silent  and  wild-eyed,  his  back  firmly 
pressed  against  the  chair  and  the  newspaper, 
in  a  concentrated  struggle  with  fate. 

Matthew  Arnold  was  another  of  the  party, 
and  I  have  a  vision  of  my  uncle  standing 
talking  with  M.  Taine,  with  whom  he  then 
and  there  made  a  lasting  friendship.  The 
Frenchman  was  not,  I  trust,  aware  at  that 
moment  of  the  heresies  of  the  English  critic 
who  had  ventured  only  a  few  years  before  to 
speak  of  "the  exaggerated  French  estimate 
of  Racine,"  and  even  to  indorse  the  judgment 
of  Joubert — "Racine  est  le  Virgile  des  ig- 
norants"!  Otherwise  M.  Taine  might  have 
given  an  even  sharper  edge  than  he  actually 
did  to  his  remarks,  in  his  letters  home,  on 
the  critical  faculty  of  the  English.  "In  all 
that  I  read  and  hear,"  he  says  to  Madame 
Taine,  "I  see  nowhere  the  fine  literary  sense 
which  means  the  gift — or  the  art — of  un- 

157 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

derstanding  the  souls  and  passions  of  the 
past."  And  again,  "I  have  had  infinite 
trouble  to-day  to  make  my  audience  appre- 
ciate some  finesses  of  Racine."  There  is  a 
note  of  resigned  exasperation  in  these  com- 
ments which  reminds  me  of  the  passionate 
feeling  of  another  French  critic — Edmond 
Scherer,  Sainte-Beuve's  best  successor — ten 
years  later.  A  propos  of  some  judgment  of 
Matthew  Arnold — whom  Scherer  delighted 
in — on  Racine,  of  the  same  kind  as  those  I 
have  already  quoted,  the  French  man  of 
letters  once  broke  out  to  me,  almost  with 
fury,  as  we  walked  together  at  Versailles. 
But,  after  all,  was  the  Oxford  which  con- 
tained Pater,  Pattison,  and  Bywater,  which 
had  nurtured  Matthew  Arnold  and  Swin- 
burne— Swinburne  with  his  wonderful  knowl- 
edge of  the  intricacies  and  subtleties  of  the 
French  tongue  and  the  French  literature — 
merely  " solide  and  positif,"  as  Taine  declares? 
The  judgment  is,  I  think,  a  characteristic 
judgment  of  that  man  of  formulas — often  so 
brilliant  and  often  so  mistaken — who,  in  the 
famous  History  of  English  Literature,  taught 
his  English  readers  as  much  by  his  blunders 
as  by  his  merits.  He  provoked  us  into  think- 
ing. And  what  critic  does  more?  Is  not  the 
whole  fraternity  like  so  many  successive 
Penelopes,  each  unraveling  the  web  of  the 

158 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT   OXFORD 

one  before?  The  point  is  that  the  web 
should  be  eternally  remade  and  eternally 
unraveled. 


ii 


I  married  Mr.  Thomas  Humphry  Ward, 
Fellow  and  Tutor  of  Brasenose  College,  on 
April  6,  1872,  the  knot  being  tied  by  my 
father's  friend,  my  grandfather's  pupil  and 
biographer,  Dean  Stanley.  For  nine  years, 
till  the  spring  of  1881,  we  lived  in  Oxford, 
in  a  little  house  north  of  the  Parks,  in  what 
was  then  the  newest  quarter  of  the  University 
town.  They  were  years,  for  both  of  us,  of 
great  happiness  and  incessant  activity.  Our 
children,  two  daughters  and  a  son,  were  born 
in  1874,  1876,  and  1879.  We  had  many 
friends,  all  pursuing  the  same  kind  of  life  as 
ourselves,  and  interested  in  the  same  kind  of 
things.  Nobody  under  the  rank  of  a  Head  of 
a  College,  except  a  very  few  privileged 
Professors,  possessed  as  much  as  a  thousand 
a  year.  The  average  income  of  the  new  race 
of  married  tutors  was  not  much  more  than 
half  that  sum.  Yet  we  all  gave  dinner- 
parties and  furnished  our  houses  with  Morris 
papers,  old  chests  and  cabinets,  and  blue 
pots.  The  dinner-parties  were  simple  and 
short.  At  our  own  early  efforts  of  the  kind 

159 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

there  certainly  was  not  enough  to  eat.  But 
we  all  improved  with  time;  and  on  the 
whole  I  think  we  were  very  fair  housekeepers 
and  competent  mothers.  Most  of  us  were 
very  anxious  to  be  up-to-date  and  in  the 
fashion,  whether  in  esthetics,  in  housekeep- 
ing, or  in  education.  But  our  fashion  was 
not  that  of  Belgravia  or  Mayfair,  which,  in- 
deed, we  scorned!  It  was  the  fashion  of  the 
movement  which  sprang  from  Morris  and 
Burne-Jones.  Liberty  stuffs  very  plain  in 
line,  but  elaborately  "  smocked/'  were  greatly 
in  vogue,  and  evening  dresses,  "cut  square," 
or  with  "Watteau  pleats,"  were  generally 
worn,  and  often  in  conscious  protest  against 
the  London  "low  dress,"  which  Oxford — 
young  married  Oxford — thought  both  ugly 
and  "fast."  And  when  we  had  donned  our 
Liberty  gowns  we  went  out  to  dinner,  the 
husband  walking,  the  wife  in  a  bath  chair, 
drawn  by  an  ancient  member  of  an  ancient 
and  close  fraternity — the  "chairmen"  of  old 
Oxford. 

Almost  immediately  opposite  to  us  in  the 
Bradmore  Road  lived  Walter  Pater  and  his 
sisters.  The  exquisiteness  of  their  small 
house,  and  the  charm  of  the  three  people 
who  lived  in  it,  will  never  be  forgotten  by 
those  who  knew  them  well  in  those  days  when 
by  the  publication  of  the  Studies  in  the 

160 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT    OXFORD 

Renaissance  (1873)  their  author  had  just 
become  famous.  I  recall  very  clearly  the 
effect  of  that  book,  and  of  the  strange  and 
poignant  sense  of  beauty  expressed  in  it; 
of  its  entire  aloofness  also  from  the  Christian 
tradition  of  Oxford,  its  glorification  of  the 
higher  and  intenser  forms  of  esthetic  pleasure, 
of  " passion"  in  the  intellectual  sense — as 
against  the  Christian  doctrine  of  self-denial 
and  renunciation.  It  was  a  gospel  that  both 
stirred  and  scandalized  Oxford.  The  bishop 
of  the  diocese  thought  it  worth  while  to  pro- 
test. There  was  a  cry  of  "Neo-paganism," 
and  various  attempts  at  persecution.  The 
author  of  the  book  was  quite  unmoved.  In 
those  days  Walter  Pater's  mind  was  still 
full  of  revolutionary  ferments  which  were 
just  as  sincere,  just  as  much  himself,  as  that 
later  hesitating  and  wistful  return  toward 
Christianity,  and  Christianity  of  the  Catholic 
type,  which  is  embodied  in  Marius  the  Epi- 
curean, the  most  beautiful  of  the  spiritual 
romances  of  Europe  since  the  Confessions. 
I  can  remember  a  dinner-party  at  his  house, 
where  a  great  tumult  arose  over  some  abrupt 
statement  of  his  made  to  the  High  Church 
wife  of  a  well-known  Professor.  Pater  had 
been  in  some  way  pressed  controversially 
beyond  the  point  of  wisdom,  and  had  said 
suddenly  that  no  reasonable  person  could 

161 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

govern  his  life  by  the  opinions  or  actions  of 
a  man  who  died  eighteen  centuries  ago.  The 
Professor  and  his  wife — I  look  back  to  them 
both  with  the  warmest  affection — departed 
hurriedly,  in  agitation;  and  the  rest  of  us 
only  gradually  found  out  what  had  happened. 
But  before  we  left  Oxford  in  1881  this  atti- 
tude of  mind  had,  I  think,  greatly  changed. 
Mr.  Gosse,  in  the  memoir  of  Walter  Pater 
contributed  to  the  Dictionary  of  National 
Biography,  says  that  before  1870  he  had 
gradually  relinquished  all  belief  in  the  Chris- 
tian religion — and  leaves  it  there.  But  the 
interesting  and  touching  thing  to  watch  was 
the  gentle  and  almost  imperceptible  flowing 
back  of  the  tide  over  the  sands  it  had  left 
bare.  It  may  be  said,  I  think,  that  he  never 
returned  to  Christianity  in  the  orthodox  or 
intellectual  sense.  But  his  heart  returned 
to  it.  He  became  once  more  endlessly  inter- 
ested in  it,  and  haunted  by  the  " something" 
in  it  which  he  thought  inexplicable.  A  re- 
membrance of  my  own  shows  this.  In  my 
ardent  years  of  exploration  and  revolt,  con- 
ditioned by  the  historical  work  that  occupied 
me  during  the  later  'seventies,  I  once  said  to 
him  in  tete-a-t^te,  reckoning  confidently  on 
his  sympathy,  and  with  the  intolerance  and 
certainty  of  youth,  that  orthodoxy  could  not 
possibly  maintain  itself  long  against  its  as- 

162 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT    OXFORD 

sailants,  especially  from  the  historical  and 
literary  camps,  and  that  we  should  live  to 
see  it  break  down.  He  shook  his  head  and 
looked  rather  troubled. 

"I  don't  think  so,"  he  said.  Then,  with 
hesitation:  "And  we  don't  altogether  agree. 
You  think  it's  all  plain.  But  I  can't.  There 
are  such  mysterious  things.  Take  that  say- 
ing, 'Come  unto  me,  all  ye  that  are  weary 
and  heavy-laden.'  How  can  you  explain  that? 
There  is  a  mystery  in  it — something  super- 
natural." 

A  few  years  later,  I  should  very  likely  have 
replied  that  the  answer  of  the  modern  critic 
would  be,  "The  words  you  quote  are  in  all 
probability  from  a  lost  Wisdom  book;  there 
are  very  close  analogies  in  Proverbs  and  in 
the  Apocrypha.  They  are  a  fragment  with- 
out a  context,  and  may  represent  on  the 
Lord's  lips  either  a  quotation  or  the  text  of  a 
discourse.  Wisdom  is  speaking — the  Wis- 
dom 'which  is  justified  of  her  children." 
But  if  any  one  had  made  such  a  reply,  it 
would  not  have  affected  the  mood  in  Pater,  of 
which  this  conversation  gave  me  my  first 
glimpse,  and  which  is  expressed  again  and 
again  in  the  most  exquisite  passages  of 
Marine.  Turn  to  the  first  time  when  Marius 
— under  Marcus  Aurelius — is  present  at  a 
Christian  ceremony,  and  sees,  for  the  first 

12  163 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

time,  the  "  wonderful  spectacle  of  those  who 
believed." 

The  people  here  collected  might  have  figured 
as  the  earliest  handsel  or  pattern  of  a  new  world, 
from  the  very  face  of  which  discontent  had 
passed  away.  .  .  .  They  had  faced  life  and 
were  glad,  by  some  science  or  light  of  knowledge 
they  had,  to  which  there  was  certainly  no 
parallel  in  the  older  world.  Was  some  credible 
message  from  beyond  "the  flaming  rampart  of 
the  world" — a  message  of  hope  .  .  .  already 
molding  their  very  bodies  and  looks  and  voices, 
now  and  here? 

Or  again  to  the  thoughts  of  Marius  at  the 
approach  of  death: 

At  this  moment,  his  unclouded  receptivity  of 
soul,  grown  so  steadily  through  all  those  years, 
from  experience  to  experience,  was  at  its  height; 
the  house  was  ready  for  the  possible  guest,  the 
tablet  of  the  mind  white  and  smooth,  for  whatever 
divine  fingers  might  choose  to  write  there. 

Marius  was  published  twelve  years  after 
the  Studies  in  the  Renaissance,  and  there  is  a 
world  between  the  two  books.  Some  further 
light  will  be  thrown  on  this  later  phase  of 
Mr.  Pater's  thought  by  a  letter  he  wrote 
to  me  in  1885  on  my  translation  of  Amiel's 
From  Journal  Intime.  Here  it  is  rather 

164 


YOUNG    DAYS    AT    OXFORD 

the  middle  days  of  his  life  that  concern  me, 
and  the  years  of  happy  friendship  with  him 
and  his  sisters,  when  we  were  all  young  to- 
gether. Mr.  Pater  and  my  husband  were 
both  fellows  and  tutors  of  Brasenose,  though 
my  husband  was  much  the  younger,  a  fact 
which  naturally  brought  us  into  frequent 
contact.  And  the  beautiful  little  house 
across  the  road,  with  its  two  dear  mistresses, 
drew  me  perpetually,  both  before  and  after 
my  marriage.  The  drawing-room,  which  runs 
the  whole  breadth  of  the  house  from  the 
road  to  the  garden  behind,  was  "Paterian" 
in  every  line  and  ornament.  There  were  a 
Morris  paper;  spindle-legged  tables  and 
chairs;  a  sparing  allowance  of  blue  plates  and 
pots,  bought,  I  think,  in  Holland,  where 
Oxford  residents  in  my  day  were  always 
foraging,  to  return,  often,  with  treasures  of 
which  the  very  memory  now  stirs  a  half- 
amused  envy  of  one's  own  past  self,  that 
had  such  chances  and  lost  them;  framed 
embroidery  of  the  most  delicate  design  and 
color,  the  work  of  Mr.  Pater's  elder  sister; 
engravings,  if  I  remember  right,  from  Botti- 
celli, or  Luini,  or  Mantegna;  a  few  mirrors, 
and  a  very  few  flowers,  chosen  and  arranged 
with  a  simple  yet  conscious  art.  I  see  that 
room  always  with  the  sun  in  it,  touching 
the  polished  surfaces  of  wood  and  brass  and 

165 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

china,  and  bringing  out  its  pure,  bright  color. 
I  see  it  too  pervaded  by  the  presence  of  the 
younger  sister,  Clara — a  personality  never  to 
be  forgotten  by  those  who  loved  her.  Clara 
Pater,  whose  grave  and  noble  beauty  in 
youth  has  been  preserved  in  a  drawing  by 
Mr.  Wirgman,  was  indeed  a  "rare  and  dedi- 
cated spirit."  When  I  first  knew  her  she 
was  four  or  five  and  twenty,  intelligent,  alive, 
sympathetic,  with  a  delightful  humor  and 
a  strong  judgment,  but  without  much  posi- 
tive acquirement.  Then  after  some  years 
she  began  to  learn  Latin  and  Greek  with  a 
view  to  teaching;  and  after  we  left  Oxford 
she  became  Vice-President  of  the  new  Somer- 
ville  College  for  Women.  Several  genera- 
tions of  girl-students  must  still  preserve  the 
tenderest  and  most  grateful  memories  of  all 
that  she  was  there,  as  woman,  teacher,  and 
friend.  Her  point  of  view,  her  opinion,  had 
always  the  crispness,  the  savor  that  goes  with 
perfect  sincerity.  She  feared  no  one,  and 
she  loved  many,  as  they  loved  her.  She 
loved  animals,  too,  as  all  the  household  did. 
How  well  I  remember  the  devoted  nursing 
given  by  the  brother  and  sisters  to  a  poor 
little  paralytic  cat,  whose  life  they  tried  to 
save — in  vain!  When,  later,  I  came  across 
in  Marius  the  account  of  Marcus  Aurelius 
carrying  away  the  dead  child  Annius  Verus 

166 


YOUNG    DAYS   AT    OXFORD 

— "  pressed  closely  to  his  bosom,  as  if  yearn- 
ing just  then  for  one  thing  only,  to  be  united, 
to  be  absolutely  one  with  it,  in  its  obscure 
distress"  —I  remembered  the  absorption  of 
the  writer  of  those  lines,  and  of  his  sisters, 
in  the  suffering  of  that  poor  little  creature, 
long  years  before.  I  feel  tolerably  certain 
that  in  writing  the  words  Walter  Pater  had 
that  past  experience  in  mind. 

After  Walter  Pater's  death,  Clara,  with 
her  elder  sister,  became  the  vigilant  and  joint 
guardians  of  their  brother's  books  and  fame, 
till,  four  years  ago,  a  terrible  illness  cut 
short  her  life,  and  set  free,  in  her  brother's 
words,  the  "unclouded  and  receptive  soul." 


CHAPTER  VII 

BALLIOL   AND   LINCOLN 

VV7HEN  the  Oxford  historian  of  the  fu- 
™  ture  comes  across  the  name  and  in- 
fluence of  Benjamin  Jowett,  the  famous 
Master  of  Balliol,  and  Greek  professor,  in 
the  mid-current  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
he  will  not  be  without  full  means  of  finding 
out  what  made  that  slight  figure  (whereof  he 
will  be  able  to  study  the  outward  and  visible 
presence  in  some  excellent  portraits,  and  in 
many  caricatures)  so  significant  and  so 
representative.  The  Life  of  the  Master,  by 
Evelyn  Abbott  and  Lewis  Campbell,  is  to  me 
one  of  the  most  interesting  biographies  of  our 
generation.  It  is  long — for  those  who  have 
no  Oxford  ties,  no  doubt,  too  long;  and  it  is 
cumbered  with  the  echoes  of  old  controver- 
sies, theological  and  academic,  which  have 
mostly,  though  by  no  means  wholly,  passed 
into  a  dusty  limbo.  But  it  is  one  of  the  rare 
attempts  that  English  biography  has  seen  to 
paint  a  man  as  he  really  was;  and  to  paint 
him  not  with  the  sub-malicious  strokes  of  a 
Purcell,  but  in  love,  although  in  truth. 
The  Master,  as  he  fought  his  many  fights, 

168 


BENJAMIN   JOWETT 


BALLIOL    AND    LINCOLN 

with  his  abnormally  strong  will  and  his 
dominating  personality;  the  Master,  as  he 
appeared,  on  the  one  hand,  to  the  upholders 
of  "  research,"  of  learning,  that  is,  as  an  end 
in  itself  apart  from  teaching,  and,  on  the 
other,  to  the  High-Churchmen  encamped  in 
Christ  Church,  to  Pusey,  Liddon,  and  all 
their  clan — pugnacious,  formidable,  and  gen- 
erally successful — here  he  is  to  the  life.  This 
is  the  Master  whose  personality  could  never 
be  forgotten  in  any  room  he  chose  to  enter; 
who  brought  restraint  rather  than  ease  to 
the  gatherings  of  his  friends,  mainly  because, 
according  to  his  own  account,  of  a  shyness  he 
could  never  overcome ;  whose  company  on  a 
walk  was  too  often  more  of  a  torture  than 
an  honor  to  the  undergraduate  selected  for 
it;  whose  lightest  words  were  feared,  quoted, 
chuckled  over,  or  resented,  like  those  of  no 
one  else. 

Of  this  Master  I  have  many  remembrances. 
I  see,  for  instance,  a  drawing-room  full  of 
rather  tongue-tied,  embarrassed  guests,  some 
Oxford  residents,  some  Londoners;  and  the 
Master  among  them,  as  a  stimulating — but 
disintegrating! — force,  of  whom  every  one 
was  uneasily  conscious.  The  circle  was  wide, 
the  room  bare,  and  the  Balliol  arm-chairs 
were  not  placed  for  conversation.  On  a  high 
chair  against  the  wall  sat  a  small  boy  of  ten 

169 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

— we  will  call  him  Arthur — oppressed  by 
his  surroundings.  The  talk  languished  and 
dropped.  From  one  side  of  the  large  room, 
the  Master,  raising  his  voice,  addressed  the 
small  boy  on  the  other  side. 

"Well,  Arthur,  so  I  hear  you've  begun 
Greek.  How  are  you  getting  on?" 

To  the  small  boy  looking  round  the  room 
it  seemed  as  though  twenty  awful  grown- 
ups were  waiting  in  a  dead  silence  to  eat  him 
up.  He  rushed  upon  his  answer. 

"I — I'm  reading  the  Anabasis,"  he  said, 
desperately. 

The  false  quantity  sent  a  shock  through 
the  room.  Nobody  laughed,  out  of  sym- 
pathy with  the  boy,  who  already  knew  that 
something  dreadful  had  happened.  The 
boy's  miserable  parents,  Londoners,  who 
were  among  the  twenty,  wished  themselves 
under  the  floor.  The  Master  smiled. 

"The  Anabasis,  Arthur,"  he  said,  cheer- 
fully. "You'll  get  it  right  next  time." 

And  he  went  across  to  the  boy,  evidently 
feeling  for  him  and  wishing  to  put  him  at 
ease.  But  after  thirty  years  the  boy  and 
his  parents  still  remember  the  incident  with 
a  shiver.  It  could  not  have  produced  such 
an  effect  except  in  an  atmosphere  of  tension; 
and  that,  alas!  too  often,  was  the  atmosphere 
which  surrounded  the  Master. 

170 


BALLIOL    AND    LINCOLN 

I  can  remember,  too,  many  proud  yet 
anxious  half -hours  in  the  Master's  study- 
such  a  privilege,  yet  such  an  ordeal! — when, 
after  our  migration  to  London,  we  became, 
at  regular  intervals,  the  Master's  week-end 
visitors.  "Come  and  talk  to  me  a  little  in 
my  study,"  the  Master  would  say,  pleasantly. 
And  there  in  the  room  where  he  worked  for 
so  many  years,  as  the  interpreter  of  Greek 
thought  to  the  English  world,  one  would  take 
a  chair  beside  the  fire,  with  the  Master  oppo- 
site. I  have  described  my  fireside  tete-a- 
tetes,  as  a  girl,  with  another  head  of  a 
College — the  Rector  of  Lincoln,  Mark  Patti- 
son.  But  the  Master  was  a  far  more  stren- 
uous companion.  With  him,  there  were  no 
diversions,  none! — no  relief  from  the  breath- 
less adventure  of  trying  to  please  him  and 
doing  one's  best.  The  Rector  once,  being  a 
little  invalidish,  allowed  me  to  make  up  the 
fire,  and,  after  watching  the  process  sharply, 
said:  "Good!  Does  it  drive  you  distracted, 
too,  when  people  put  on  coals  the  wrong 
way?"  An  interruption  which  made  for 
human  sympathy!  The  Master,  as  far  as 
I  can  remember,  had  no  "nerves";  and 
"nerves"  are  a  bond  between  many.  But 
he  occasionally  had  sudden  returns  upon 
himself.  I  remember  once  after  we  had  been 
discussing  a  religious  book  which  had  in- 

m 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

terested  us  both,  he  abruptly  drew  himself 
up,  in  the  full  tide  of  talk,  and  said,  with  a 
curious  impatience,  "But  one  can't  be  always 
thinking  of  these  things!"  and  changed  the 
subject. 

So  much  for  the  Master,  the  stimulus  of 
whose  mere  presence  was,  according  to  his 
biographers,  "  of  ten  painful."  But  there 
were  at  least  two  other  Masters  in  the  "Mr. 
Jowett"  we  reverenced.  And  they,  too,  are 
fully  shown  in  this  biography.  The  Master 
who  loved  his  friends  and  thought  no  pains 
too  great  to  take  for  them,  including  the 
very  rare  pains  of  trying  to  mend  their 
characters  by  faithfulness  and  plain  speak- 
ing, whenever  he  thought  they  wanted  it. 
The  Master,  again,  whose  sympathies  were 
always  with  social  reform  and  with  the  poor, 
whose  hidden  life  was  full  of  deeds  of  kind- 
ness and  charity,  who,  in  spite  of  his  dif- 
ficulties of  manner,  was  loved  by  all  sorts 
and  conditions  of  men — and  women — in  all 
circles  of  life,  by  politicians  and  great  ladies, 
by  diplomats  and  scholars  and  poets,  by 
his  secretary  and  his  servants — there  are 
many  traits  of  this  good  man  and  useful 
citizen  recorded  by  his  biographers. 

And,  finally,  there  was  the  Master  who 
reminded  his  most  intimate  friends  of  a  sen- 
tence of  his  about  Greek  literature,  which 

172 


BALLIOL    AND    LINCOLN 

occurs  in  the  Introduction  to  the  Phcedrus: 
"  Under  the  marble  exterior  of  Greek  litera- 
ture was  concealed  a  soul  thrilling  with  spirit- 
ual emotion,"  says  the  Master.  His  own 
was  not  exactly  a  marble  exterior;  but  the 
placid  and  yet  shrewd  cheerfulness  of  his 
delicately  rounded  face,  with  its  small  mouth 
and  chin,  its  great  brow  and  frame  of  snowy 
hair,  gave  but  little  clue  to  the  sensitive  and 
mystical  soul  within.  If  ever  a  man  was 
Gottbetrunken,  it  was  the  Master,  many  of 
whose  meditations  and  passing  thoughts, 
withdrawn,  while  he  lived,  from  all  human 
ken,  yet  written  down — in  thirty  or  forty 
volumes! — for  his  own  discipline  and  re- 
membrance, can  now  be  read,  thanks  to  his 
biographers,  in  the  pages  of  the  Life.  They 
are  extraordinarily  frank  and  simple;  star- 
tling, often,  in  their  bareness  and  truth.  But 
they  are,  above  all,  the  thoughts  of  a  mystic, 
moving  in  a  Divine  presence.  An  old  and 
intimate  friend  of  the  Master's  once  said  to 
me  that  he  believed  "Jowett's  inner  mind, 
especially  toward  the  end  of  his  life,  was 
always  in  an  attitude  of  Prayer.  One  would 
go  and  talk  to  him  on  University  or  College 
business  in  his  study,  and  suddenly  see  his 
lips  moving,  slightly  and  silently,  and  know 
what  it  meant."  The  records  of  him  which 
his  death  revealed — and  his  closest  friends 

173 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

realized  it  in  life — show  a  man  perpetually 
conscious  of  a  mysterious  and  blessed  com- 
panionship; which  is  the  mark  of  the  re- 
ligious man,  in  all  faiths  and  all  churches. 
Yet  this  was  the  man  who,  for  the  High 
Church  party  at  Oxford,  with  its  head- 
quarters at  Christ  Church,  under  the  flag  of 
Doctor  Pusey  and  Canon  Liddon,  was  the 
symbol  and  embodiment  of  all  heresy;  whose 
University  salary  as  Greek  professor,  which 
depended  on  a  Christ  Church  subsidy,  was 
withheld  for  years  by  the  same  High-Church- 
men, because  of  their  inextinguishable  wrath 
against  the  Liberal  leader  who  had  con- 
tributed so  largely  to  the  test-abolishing 
legislation  of  1870 — legislation  by  which 
Oxford,  in  Liddon's  words,  was  "  logically 
lost  to  the  Church  of  England." 

Yet  no  doubt  they  had  their  excuses! 
For  this,  too,  was  the  man  who,  in  a  city 
haunted  by  Tractarian  shades,  once  said  to 
his  chief  biographer  that  "  Voltaire  had  done 
more  good  than  all  the  Fathers  of  the  Church 
put  together!" — who  scornfully  asks  him- 
self in  his  diary,  a  propos  of  the  Bishops' 
condemnation  of  Essays  and  Reviews,  "  What 
is  Truth  against  an  esprit  de  corps?" — and 
drops  out  the  quiet  dictum,  "Half  the  books 
that  are  published  are  religious  books,  and 
what  trash  this  religious  literature  is!"  Nor 

174 


BALLIOL   AND    LINCOLN 

did  the  Evangelicals  escape.  The  Master's 
dislike  for  many  well-known  hymns  specially 
dear  to  that  persuasion  was  never  concealed. 
"How  cocky  they  are!"  he  would  say,  con- 
temptuously. " '  When  upward  I  fly — Quite 
justified  I' — who  can  repeat  a  thing  like 
that?" 

How  the  old  war-cries  ring  again  in  one's 
ears  as  one  looks  back!  Those  who  have 
only  known  the  Oxford  of  the  last  twenty 
years  can  never,  I  think,  feel  toward  that 
"august  place"  as  we  did,  in  the  seventies 
of  the  last  century;  we  who  were  still  within 
sight  and  hearing  of  the  great  fighting  years 
of  an  earlier  generation,  and  still  scorched 
by  their  dying  fires.  Balliol,  Christ  Church, 
Lincoln — the  Liberal  and  utilitarian  camp, 
the  Church  camp,  the  researching  and  pure 
scholarship  camp — with  Science  and  the 
Museum  hovering  in  the  background,  as  the 
growing  aggressive  powers  of  the  future  seek- 
ing whom  they  might  devour — they  were  the 
signs  and  symbols  of  mighty  hosts,  of  great 
forces  stih1  visibly  incarnate,  and  in  marching 
array.  Balliol  versus  Christ  Church — Jowett 
versus  Pusey  and  Liddon — while  Lincoln 
despised  both,  and  the  new  scientific  forces 
watched  and  waited — that  was  how  we  saw 
the  field  of  battle,  and  the  various  alarms 
and  excursions  it  was  always  providing. 

175 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

But  Balliol  meant  more  to  me  than  the 
Master.  Professor  Thomas  Hill  Green — 
"Green  of  Balliol" — was  no  less  representa- 
tive in  our  days  of  the  spiritual  and  liberating 
forces  of  the  great  college;  and  the  time  which 
has  now  elapsed  since  his  death  has  clearly 
shown  that  his  philosophic  work  and  influence 
hold  a  lasting  and  conspicuous  place  in  the 
history  of  nineteenth-century  thought.  He 
and  his  wife  became  our  intimate  friends, 
and  in  the  Grey  of  Robert  Elsmere  I  tried  to 
reproduce  a  few  of  those  traits — traits  of  a 
great  thinker  and  teacher,  who  was  also  one 
of  the  simplest,  sincerest,  and  most  practical 
of  men — which  Oxford  will  never  forget,  so 
long  as  high  culture  and  noble  character  are 
dear  to  her.  His  wife — so  his  friend  and 
biographer,  Lewis  Nettleship,  tells  us — once 
compared  him  to  Sir  Bors  in  "The  Holy 
Grail": 

A  square-set  man  and  honest;   and  his  eyes, 
An  outdoor  sign  of  all  the  wealth  within, 
Smiled  with  his  lips — a  smile  beneath  a  cloud, 
But  Heaven  had  meant  it  for  a  sunny  one! 

A  quotation  in  which  the  mingling  of  a  cheer- 
ful, practical,  humorous  temper,  the  temper 
of  the  active  citizen  and  politician,  with  the 
heavy  tasks  of  philosophic  thought,  is  very 
happily  suggested.  As  we  knew  him,  indeed, 

176 


BALLIOL    AND    LINCOLN 

and  before  the  publication  of  the  Prolegomena 
to  Ethics  and  the  Introduction  to  the  Claren- 
don Press  edition  of  Hume  had  led  to  his 
appointment  as  Whyte's  Professor  of  Moral 
Philosophy,  Mr.  Green  was  not  only  a  lead- 
ing Balliol  tutor,  but  an  energetic  Liberal,  a 
member  both  of  the  Oxford  Town  Council 
and  of  various  University  bodies;  a  helper 
in  all  the  great  steps  taken  for  the  higher 
education  of  women  at  Oxford,  and  keenly 
attracted  by  the  project  of  a  High  School 
for  the  town  boys  of  Oxford — a  man,  in  other 
words,  preoccupied,  just  as  the  Master  was, 
and,  for  all  his  philosophic  genius,  with  the 
need  of  leading  "a  useful  life." 

Let  me  pause  to  think  how  much  that 
phrase  meant  in  the  mouths  of  the  best  men 
whom  Balliol  produced,  in  the  days  when  I 
knew  Oxford.  The  Master,  Green,  Toynbee 
— their  minds  were  full,  half  a  century  ago, 
of  the  " condition  of  the  people"  question, 
of  temperance,  housing,  wages,  electoral  re- 
form; and  within  the  University,  and  by  the 
help  of  the  weapons  of  thought  and  teaching, 
they  regarded  themselves  as  the  natural  allies 
of  the  Liberal  party  which  was  striving 
for  these  things  through  politics  and  Parlia- 
ment. "  Usefulness,"  " social  reform,"  the 
bettering  of  daily  life  for  the  many — these 
ideas  are  stamped  on  all  their  work  and 

177 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

on  all  the  biographies  of  them  that  remain 
to  us. 

And  the  significance  of  it  is  only  to  be 
realized  when  we  turn  to  the  rival  group,  to 
Christ  Church,  and  the  religious  party  which 
that  name  stood  for.  Read  the  lives  of 
Liddon,  of  Pusey,  or — to  go  farther  back— 
of  the  great  Newman  himself.  Nobody  will 
question  the  personal  goodness  and  charity 
of  any  of  the  three.  But  how  little  the  lead- 
ing ideas  of  that  seething  time  of  social  and 
industrial  reform,  from  the  appearance  of 
Sybil  in  1843  to  the  Education  BiU  of  1870, 
mattered  either  to  Pusey  or  to  Liddon, 
compared  with  the  date  of  the  Book  of 
Daniel  or  the  retention  of  the  Athanasian 
Creed?  Newman,  at  a  time  when  national 
drunkenness  was  an  overshadowing  terror  in 
the  minds  of  all  reformers,  confesses  with  a 
pathetic  frankness  that  he  had  never  con- 
sidered "  whether  there  were  too  many  pub- 
lic-houses in  England  or  no";  and  in  all  his 
religious  controversies  of  the  'thirties  and  the 
'forties,  you  will  look  in  vain  for  any  word 
of  industrial  or  political  reform.  So  also  in 
the  Life  of  that  great  rhetorician  and  beauti- 
ful personality,  Canon  Liddon,  you  will 
scarcely  find  a  single  letter  that  touches  on 
any  question  of  social  betterment.  How  to 
safeguard  the  "  principle  of  authority,"  how 

178 


BALLIOL   AND    LINCOLN 

to  uphold  the  traditional  authorship  of  the 
Pentateuch,  and  of  the  Book  of  Daniel, 
against  " infidel"  criticism;  how  to  stifle 
among  the  younger  High-Churchmen  like 
Mr.  (now  Bishop)  Gore,  then  head  of  the 
Pusey  House,  the  first  advances  toward  a 
reasonable  freedom  of  thought;  how  to 
maintain  the  doctrine  of  Eternal  Punish- 
ment against  the  protest  of  the  religious  con- 
sciousness itself — it  is  on  these  matters  that 
Canon  Liddon 's  correspondence  turns,  it 
was  to  them  his  life  was  devoted. 

How  vainly!  Who  can  doubt  now  which 
type  of  life  and  thought  had  in  it  the  seeds 
of  growth  and  permanence — the  Balliol  type, 
or  the  Christ  Church  type?  There  are  many 
High-Churchmen,  it  is  true,  at  the  present 
day,  and  many  Ritualist  Churches.  But 
they  are  alive  to-day,  just  in  so  far  as  they 
have  learned  the  lesson  of  social  pity,  and 
the  lesson  of  a  reasonable  criticism,  from  the 
men  whom  Pusey  and  Liddon  and  half  the 
bishops  condemned  and  persecuted  in  the 
middle  years  of  the  nineteenth  century. 

When  we  were  living  in  Oxford,  however, 
this  was  not  exactly  the  point  of  view  from 
which  the  great  figure  of  Liddon  presented 
itself,  to  us  of  the  Liberal  camp.  We  were 
constantly  aware  of  him,  no  doubt,  as  the 
rival  figure  to  the  Master  of  Balliol,  as  the 

13  179 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

arch  wire-puller  and  ecclesiastical  intriguer 
in  University  affairs,  leading  the  Church 
forces  with  a  more  than  Roman  astuteness. 
But  his  great  mark  was  made,  of  course,  by 
his  preaching,  and  that  not  so  much  by  the 
things  said  as  by  the  man  saying  them. 
Who  now  would  go  to  Liddon's  famous 
Bamptons,  for  all  their  learning,  for  a  still 
valid  defense  of  the  orthodox  doctrine  of  the 
Incarnation?  Those  wonderful  paragraphs 
of  subtle  argumentation  from  which  the  great 
preacher  emerged,  as  triumphantly  as  Mr. 
Gladstone  from  a  Gladstonian  sentence  in  a 
House  of  Commons  debate — what  remains 
of  them?  Liddon  wrote  of  Stanley  that  he — 
Stanley — was  "more  entirely  destitute  of  the 
logical  faculty"  than  any  educated  man  he 
knew.  In  a  sense  it  was  true.  But  Stanley, 
if  he  had  been  aware  of  the  criticism,  might 
have  replied  that,  if  he  lacked  logic,  Liddon 
lacked  something  much  more  vital — i.  e.,  the 
sense  of  history — and  of  the  relative  value 
of  testimony! 

Newman,  Pusey,  Liddon — all  three,  great 
schoolmen,  arguing  from  an  accepted  brief; 
the  man  of  genius,  the  man  of  a  vast  industry, 
intense  but  futile,  the  man  of  captivating 
presence  and  a  perfect  rhetoric — history, 
with  its  patient  burrowings,  has  surely  un- 
dermined the  work  of  all  three,  sparing  only 

180 


BALLIOL    AND    LINCOLN 

that  element  in  the  work  of  one  of  them — 
Newman — which  is  the  preserving  salt  of 
all  literature — i.  e.,  the  magic  of  person- 
ality. And  some  of  the  most  efficacious  bur- 
rowers  have  been  their  own  spiritual  chil- 
dren. As  was  fitting!  For  the  Tractarian 
movement,  with  its  appeal  to  the  primitive 
Church,  was  in  truth,  and  quite  uncon- 
sciously, one  of  the  agencies  in  a  great 
process  of  historical  inquiry  which  is  still 
going  on,  and  of  which  the  end  is  not  yet. 

But  to  me,  in  my  twenties,  these  great 
names  were  not  merely  names  or  symbols,  as 
they  are  to  the  men  and  women  of  the  present 
generation.  Newman  I  had  seen  in  my 
childhood,  walking  about  the  streets  of 
Edgbaston,  and  had  shrunk  from  him  in  a 
dumb,  childish  resentment  as  from  some  one 
whom  I  understood  to  be  the  author  of  our 
family  misfortunes.  In  those  days,  as  I 
have  already  recalled  in  an  earlier  chapter, 
the  daughters  of  a  "mixed  marriage"  were 
brought  up  in  the  mother's  faith,  and  the 
sons  in  the  father's.  I,  therefore,  as  a  school- 
girl under  Evangelical  influence,  was  not  al- 
lowed to  make  friends  with  any  of  my 
father's  Catholic  colleagues.  Then,  in  1880, 
twenty  years  later,  Newman  came  to  Oxford, 
and  on  Trinity  Monday  there  was  a  great 
gathering  at  Trinity  College,  where  the  Car- 

181 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

dinal  in  his  red,  a  blanched  and  spiritual 
presence,  received  the  homage  of  a  new 
generation  who  saw  in  him  a  great  soul  and 
a  great  master  of  English,  and  cared  little  or 
nothing  for  the  controversies  in  which  he 
had  spent  his  prime.  As  my  turn  came  to 
shake  hands,  I  recalled  my  father  to  him  and 
the  Edgbaston  days.  His  face  lit  up — al- 
most mischievously.  "Are  you  the  little 
girl  I  remember  seeing  sometimes — in  the 
distance?"  he  said  to  me,  with  a  smile  and 
a  look  that  only  he  and  I  understood. 

On  the  Sunday  preceding  that  gathering  I 
went  to  hear  his  last  sermon  in  the  city  he 
had  loved  so  well,  preached  at  the  new 
Jesuit  church  in  the  suburbs;  while  little 
more  than  a  mile  away,  Bidding  Prayer  and 
sermon  were  going  on  as  usual  in  the  Uni- 
versity Church  where  in  his  youth,  week  by 
week,  he  had  so  deeply  stirred  the  hearts 
and  consciences  of  men.  The  sermon  in  St. 
Aloysius's  was  preached  with  great  difficulty, 
and  was  almost  incoherent  from  the  physical 
weakness  of  the  speaker.  Yet  who  that  was 
present  on  that  Sunday  will  ever  forget  the 
great  ghost  that  fronted  them,  the  faltering 
accents,  the  words  from  which  the  life-blood 
had  departed,  yet  not  the  charm? 

Then — Pusey!  There  comes  back  to  me 
a  bowed  and  uncouth  figure,  whom  one  used 

182 


BALLIOL   AND    LINCOLN 

to  see  both  in  the  Cathedral  procession  on 
a  Sunday,  and — rarely — in  the  University 
pulpit.  One  sermon  on  Darwinism,  which 
was  preached,  if  I  remember  right,  in  the 
early  'seventies,  remains  with  me,  as  the  ap- 
pearance of  some  modern  Elijah,  returning 
after  long  silence  and  exile  to  protest  against 
an  unbelieving  world.  Sara  Coleridge  had 
years  before  described  Pusey  in  the  pulpit 
with  a  few  vivid  strokes. 

He  has  not  one  of  the  graces  of  oratory  [she 
says].  His  discourse  is  generally  a  rhapsody 
describing  with  infinite  repetition  the  wickedness 
of  sin,  the  worthlessness  of  earth,  and  the  blessed- 
ness of  Heaven.  He  is  as  still  as  a  statue  all  the 
time  he  is  uttering  it,  looks  as  white  as  a  sheet, 
and  is  as  monotonous  in  delivery  as  possible. 

Nevertheless,  Pusey  wielded  a  spell  which 
is  worth  much  oratory — the  spell  of  a  soul 
dwelling  spiritually  on  the  heights;  and  a 
prophet,  moreover,  may  be  as  monotonous 
or  as  incoherent  as  he  pleases,  while  the 
world  is  still  in  tune  with  his  message.  But 
in  the  'seventies,  Oxford,  at  least,  was  no 
longer  in  tune  with  Pusey's  message,  and 
the  effect  of  the  veteran  leader,  trying  to 
come  to  terms  with  Darwinism,  struggling, 
that  is,  with  new  and  stubborn  forces  he  had 
no  further  power  to  bind,  was  tragic,  or 

183 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

pathetic,  as  such  things  must  always  be. 
New  Puseys  arise  in  every  century.  The 
"sons  of  authority"  will  never  perish  out  of 
the  earth.  But  the  language  changes  and 
the  argument  changes;  and  perhaps  there 
are  none  more  secretly  impatient  with  the 
old  prophet  than  those  younger  spirits  of  his 
own  kind  who  are  already  stepping  into  his 
shoes. 

Far  different  was  the  effect  of  Liddon,  in 
those  days,  upon  us  younger  folk!  The 
grace  and  charm  of  Liddon's  personal  pres- 
ence were  as  valuable  to  his  party  in  the 
'seventies  as  that  of  Dean  Stanley  had  been 
to  Liberalism  at  an  earlier  stage.  There  was 
indeed  much  in  common  between  the  aspect 
and  manner  of  the  two  men,  though  no  like- 
ness, in  the  strict  sense,  whatever.  But  the 
exquisite  delicacy  of  feature,  the  brightness 
of  eye,  the  sensitive  play  of  expression,  were 
alike  in  both.  Saint  Simon  says  of  Fenelon : 

He  was  well  made,  pale,  with  eyes  that  show- 
ered intelligence  and  fire — and  with  a  physiog- 
nomy that  no  one  who  had  seen  it  once  could 
forget.  It  had  both  gravity  and  polish,  serious- 
ness and  gaiety;  it  spoke  equally  of  the  scholar, 
the  bishop,  and  the  grand  seigneur,  and  the  final 
impression  was  one  of  intelligence,  subtlety, 
grace,  charm;  above  all,  of  dignity.  One  had 

to  tear  oneself  from  looking  at  him. 

184 


BALLIOL   AND    LINCOLN 

Many  of  those  who  knew  Liddon  best 
could,  I  think,  have  adapted  this  language 
to  him;  and  there  is  much  in  it  that  fitted 
Arthur  Stanley. 

But  the  love  and  gift  for  managing  men 
was  of  course  a  secondary  thing  in  the  case 
of  our  great  preacher.  The  University  poli- 
tics of  Liddon  and  his  followers  are  dead  and 
gone;  and  as  I  have  ventured  to  think,  the 
intellectual  force  of  Liddon's  thoughts  and 
arguments,  as  they  are  presented  to  us  now 
on  the  printed  page,  is  also  a  thing  of  the 
past.  But  the  vision  of  the  preacher  in 
those  who  saw  it  is  imperishable.  The 
scene  in  St.  Paul's  has  been  often  described, 
by  none  better  than  by  Doctor  Liddon's 
colleague,  Canon  Scott  Holland.  But  the 
Oxford  scene,  with  all  its  Old  World  setting, 
was  more  touching,  more  interesting.  As  I 
think  of  it,  I  seem  to  be  looking  out  from 
those  dark  seats  under  the  undergraduates' 
gallery — where  sat  the  wives  of  the  Masters 
of  Arts — at  the  crowded  church,  as  it  waited 
for  the  preacher.  First  came  the  stir  of  the 
procession;  the  long  line  of  Heads  of  Houses, 
in  their  scarlet  robes  as  Doctors  of  Divinity — 
all  but  the  two  heretics,  Pattison  and  Jowett, 
who  walked  in  their  plain  black,  and  warmed 
my  heart  always  thereby!  And  then  the 
Vice-Chancellor,  with  the  " pokers"  and  the 

185 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

preacher.  All  eyes  were  fixed  on  the  slender, 
willowy  figure,  and  the  dark  head  touched 
with  silver.  The  bow  to  the  Vice-Chancellor 
as  they  parted  at  the  foot  of  the  pulpit  stairs, 
the  mounting  of  the  pulpit,  the  quiet  look 
out  over  the  Church,  the  Bidding  Prayer,  the 
voice — it  was  all  part  of  an  incomparable 
performance  which  cannot  be  paralleled 
to-day. 

The  voice  was  high  and  penetrating,  with- 
out much  variety,  as  I  remember  it;  but  of 
beautiful  quality,  and  at  times  wonderfully 
moving.  And  what  was  still  more  appeal- 
ing was  the  evident  strain  upon  the  speaker 
of  his  message.  It  wore  him  out  visibly  as 
he  delivered  it.  He  came  down  from  the 
pulpit  white  and  shaken,  dripping  with 
perspiration.  Virtue  had  gone  out  of  him. 
Yet  his  effort  had  never  for  a  moment  weak- 
ened his  perfect  self-control,  the  flow  and 
finish  of  the  long  sentences,  or  the  subtle 
interconnection  of  the  whole!  One  Sunday 
I  remember  in  particular.  Oxford  had  been 
saddened  the  day  before  by  the  somewhat 
sudden  death  of  a  woman  whom  everybody 
loved  and  respected — Mrs.  Acland,  the  wife 
of  the  well-known  doctor  and  professor. 
And  Liddon,  with  a  wonderfully  happy  in- 
stinct, had  added  to  his  sermon  a  paragraph 
dealing  with  Mrs.  Acland's  death,  which  held 

186 


BALLIOL    AND    LINCOLN 

us  all  spellbound  till  the  beautiful  words 
died  into  silence.  It  was  done  with  a  fas- 
tidious literary  taste  that  is  rather  French 
than  English;  and  yet  it  came  from  the  very 
heart  of  the  speaker.  Looking  back  through 
my  many  memories  of  Doctor  Liddon  as  a 
preacher,  that  tribute  to  a  noble  woman  in 
death  remains  with  me  as  the  finest  and  most 
lasting  of  them  all. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

EARLY   MARRIED   LIFE 

LJOW  many  other  figures  in  that  vanished 
*•  *•  Oxford  world  I  should  like  to  draw! — 
Mandell  or  "Max"  Creighton,  our  lifelong 
friend,  then  just  married  to  the  wife  who 
was  his  best  comrade  while  he  lived,  and 
since  his  death  has  made  herself  an  indepen- 
dent force  in  English  life.  I  first  remember 
the  future  Bishop  of  London  when  I  was 
fifteen,  and  he  was  reading  history  with  my 
father  on  a  Devonshire  reading-party.  The 
tall,  slight  figure  in  blue  serge,  the  red-gold 
hair,  the  spectacles,  the  keen  features  and 
quiet,  commanding  eye — I  see  them  first 
against  a  background  of  rocks  on  the  Lynton 
shore.  Then  again,  a  few  years  later,  in  his 
beautiful  Merton  rooms,  with  the  vine 
tendrils  curling  round  the  windows,  the 
Morris  paper,  and  the  blue  willow-pattern 
plates  upon  it,  that  he  was  surely  the  first 
to  collect  in  Oxford.  A  luncheon-party  re- 
turns upon  me — in  Brasenose — where  the 
brilliant  Merton  Fellow  and  tutor,  already  a 
power  in  Oxford,  first  met  his  future  wife; 
afterward,  their  earliest  married  home  in 

188 


EARLY   MARRIED   LIFE 

Oxford  so  near  to  ours,  in  the  new  region  of 
the  Parks;  then  the  Vicarage  on  the  North- 
umberland coast  where  Creighton  wrestled 
with  the  north-country  folk,  with  their  vir- 
tues and  their  vices,  drinking  deep  draughts 
thereby  from  the  sources  of  human  nature; 
where  he  read  and  wrote  history,  preparing 
for  his  magnum  opus,  the  history  of  the 
Renaissance  Popes;  where  he  entertained  his 
friends,  brought  up  his  children,  and  took 
mighty  walks — always  the  same  restless, 
energetic,  practical,  pondering  spirit,  his 
mind  set  upon  the  Kingdom  of  God,  and 
convinced  that  in  and  through  the  English 
Church  a  man  might  strive  for  the  Kingdom 
as  faithfully  and  honestly  as  anywhere  else. 
The  intellectual  doubts  and  misgivings  on  the 
subject  of  taking  orders,  so  common  in  the 
Oxford  of  his  day,  Creighton  had  never  felt. 
His  life  had  ripened  to  a  rich  maturity  with- 
out, apparently,  any  of  those  fundamental 
conflicts  which  had  scarred  the  lives  of  other 
men. 

The  fact  set  him  in  strong  contrast  with 
another  historian  who  was  also  our  intimate 
friend — John  Richard  Green.  When  I  first 
knew  him,  during  my  engagement  to  my 
husband,  and  seven  years  before  the  Short 
History  was  published,  he  had  just  practically 
— though  not  formally — given  up  his  orders. 

189 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

He  had  been  originally  curate  to  my  hus- 
band's father,  who  held  a  London  living,  and 
the  bond  between  him  and  his  Vicar's  family 
was  singularly  close  and  affectionate.  After 
the  death  of  the  dear  mother  of  the  flock,  a 
saintly  and  tender  spirit,  to  whom  Mr. 
Green  was  much  attached,  he  remained  the 
faithful  friend  of  all  her  children.  How  much 
I  had  heard  of  him  before  I  saw  him!  The 
expectation  of  our  first  meeting  filled  me 
with  trepidation.  Should  I  be  admitted, 
too,  into  that  large  and  generous  heart? 
Would  he  "pass"  the  girl  who  had  dared  to 
be  his  " boy's"  fiancee?  But  after  ten  min- 
utes all  was  well,  and  he  was  my  friend  no 
less  than  my  husband's,  to  the  last  hour  of 
his  fruitful,  suffering  life. 

And  how  much  it  meant,  his  friendship! 
It  became  plain  very  soon  after  our  marriage 
that  ours  was  to  be  a  literary  partnership. 
My  first  published  story,  written  when  I 
was  eighteen,  had  appeared  in  the  Church- 
man's Magazine  in  1870,  and  an  article  on 
the  "Poema  del  Cid,"  the  first-fruits  of  my 
Spanish  browsings  in  the  Bodleian,  appeared 
in  Macmillan  early  in  1872.  My  husband 
was  already  writing  in  the  Saturday  Review 
and  other  quarters,  and  had  won  his  literary 
spurs  as  one  of  the  three  authors  of  that 
jeu  d'esprit  of  no  small  fame  in  its  day,  the 

190 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

Oxford  Spectator.  Our  three  children  ar- 
rived in  1874,  1876,  and  1879,  and  all  the 
time  I  was  reading,  listening,  talking,  and 
beginning  to  write  in  earnest — mostly  for 
the  Saturday  Review.  "J.  R.  G.,"  as  we 
loved  to  call  him,  took  up  my  efforts  with 
the  warmest  encouragement,  tempered,  in- 
deed, by  constant  fears  that  I  should  become 
a  hopeless  bookworm  and  dryasdust,  yield- 
ing day  after  day  to  the  mere  luxury  of 
reading,  and  putting  nothing  into  shape! 

Against  this  supposed  tendency  in  me  he 
railed  perpetually.  "Any  one  can  read!"  he 
would  say;  "anybody  of  decent  wits  can 
accumulate  notes  and  references;  the  diffi- 
culty is  to  write — to  make  something !"  And 
later  on,  when  I  was  deep  in  Spanish  chron- 
icles and  thinking  vaguely  of  a  History  of 
Spain — early  Spain,  at  any  rate — he  wrote, 
almost  impatiently:  "Begin  —  and  begin 
your  book.  Don't  do  'studies'  and  that 
sort  of  thing — one's  book  teaches  one  every- 
thing as  one  writes  it."  I  was  reminded  of 
that  letter  years  later  when  I  came  across, 
in  Amiel's  Journal,  a  passage  almost  to  the 
same  effect:  "It  is  by  writing  that  one 
learns — it  is  by  pumping  that  one  draws 
water  into  one's  well."  But  in  J.  R.  G.'s 
case  the  advice  he  gave  his  friend  was  carried 
out  by  himself  through  every  hour  of  his 

191 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

short,  concentrated  life.  "He  died  learn- 
ing/' as  the  inscription  on  his  grave  testifies; 
but  he  also  died  making.  In  other  words, 
the  shaping,  creative  instinct  wrestled  in 
him  with  the  powers  of  death  through  long 
years,  and  never  deserted  him  to  the  very 
end.  Who  that  has  ever  known  the  passion 
of  the  writer  and  the  student  can  read  with- 
out tears  the  record  of  his  last  months? 
He  was  already  doomed  when  I  first  saw 
him  in  1871,  for  signs  of  tuberculosis  had 
been  discovered  in  1869,  and  all  through  the 
'seventies  and  till  he  died,  in  1883,  while 
he  was  writing  the  Short  History,  the  ex- 
panded Library  Edition  in  four  volumes,  and 
the  two  brilliant  monographs  on  The  Making 
of  England  and  The  Conquest  of  England, 
the  last  of  which  was  put  together  from  his 
notes,  and  finished  by  his  devoted  wife  and 
secretary  after  his  death,  he  was  fighting 
for  his  life,  in  order  that  he  might  finish 
his  work.  He  was  a  dying  man  from  Janu- 
ary, 1881,  but  he  finished  and  published  The 
Making  of  England  in  1882,  and  began  The 
Conquest  of  England.  On  February  25th, 
ten  days  before  his  death,  his  wife  told  him 
that  the  end  was  near.  He  thought  a  little, 
and  said  that  he  had  still  something  to  say 
in  his  book  "  which  is  worth  saying.  I  will 
make  a  fight  for  it.  I  will  do  what  I  can. 

192 


EARLY   MARRIED   LIFE 

and  I  must  have  sleeping-draughts  for  a 
week.  After  that  it  will  not  matter  if  they 
lose  their  effect."  He  worked  on  a  little 
longer — but  on  March  7th  all  was  over.  My 
husband  had  gone  out  to  see  him  in  February, 
and  came  home  marveling  at  the  miracle  of 
such  life  in  death. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  wonderful  stimulus 
and  encouragement  he  could  give  to  the 
young  student.  But  he  was  no  flatterer. 
No  one  could  strike  harder  or  swifter  than 
he,  when  he  chose. 

It  was  to  me — in  his  eager  friendship  for 
"Humphry's"  young  wife — he  first  intrusted 
the  task  of  that  primer  of  English  literature 
which  afterward  Mr.  Stopford  Brooke  carried 
out  with  such  astonishing  success.  But  I 
was  far  too  young  for  such  a  piece  of  work, 
and  knew  far  too  little.  I  wrote  a  beginning, 
however,  and  took  it  up  to  him  when  he 
was  in  rooms  in  Beaumont  Street.  He  was 
entirely  dissatisfied  with  it,  and  as  gently 
and  kindly  as  possible  told  me  it  wouldn't 
do  and  that  I  must  give  it  up.1  Then  throw- 

1  Since  writing  these  lines,  I  have  been  amused  to  discover 
the  following  reference  in  the  brilliant  biography  of  Stopford 
Brooke,  by  his  son-in-law,  Principal  Jacks,  to  my  unlucky 
attempt.  "The  only  advantage,"  says  Mr.  Brooke  in  his 
diary  for  May  8,  1899,  "the  older  writer  has  over  the  younger 
is  that  he  knows  what  to  leave  out  and  has  a  juster  sense  of 
proportion.  I  remember  that  when  Green  wanted  the  Primer 

of  English  Literature  to  be  done,  Mrs. asked  if  she  might 

193 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

ing  it  aside,  he  began  to  walk  up  and  down 
his  room,  sketching  out  how  such  a  general 
outline  of  English  literature  might  be  written 
and  should  be  written.  I  sat  by  enchant- 
ed, all  my  natural  disappointment  charmed 
away.  The  knowledge,  the  enthusiasm,  the 
shaping  power  of  the  frail  human  being 
moving  there  before  me — with  the  slight, 
emaciated  figure,  the  great  brow,  the  bright 
eyes;  all  the  physical  presence  instinct, 
aflame,  with  the  intellectual  and  poetic  pas- 
sion which  grew  upon  him  as  he  traced  the 
mighty  stream  of  England's  thought  and 
song — it  was  an  experience  never  forgotten, 
one  of  those  by  which  mind  teaches  mind, 
and  the  endless  succession  is  carried  on. 

There  is  another  memory  from  the  early 
time,  which  comes  back  to  me — of  J.  R.  G. 
in  Notre  Dame.  We  were  on  our  honey- 
moon journey,  and  we  came  across  him  in 
Paris.  We  went  together  to  Notre  Dame, 
and  there,  as  we  all  lingered  at  the  western 
end,  looking  up  to  the  gleaming  color  of  the 
distant  apse,  the  spirit  came  upon  him.  He 
began  to  describe  what  the  Church  had  seen, 
coming  down  through  the  generations,  from 
vision  to  vision.  He  spoke  in  a  low  voice, 

try  her  hand  at  it.  He  said  'Yes,'  and  she  set  to  work.  She 
took  a  fancy  to  Beowulf,  and  wrote  twenty  pages  on  it!  At 
this  rate  the  book  would  have  run  to  more  than  a  thousand 
pages." 

194 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

but  without  a  pause  or  break,  standing  in 
deep  shadow  close  to  the  western  door.  One 
scarcely  saw  him,  and  I  almost  lost  the  sense 
of  his  individuality.  It  seemed  to  be  the 
very  voice  of  History — Life  telling  of  itself. 
Liberty  and  the  passion  for  liberty  were 
the  very  breath  of  his  being.  In  1871,  just 
after  the  Commune,  I  wrote  him  a  cry  of 
pity  and  horror  about  the  execution  of 
Rossel,  the  "  heroic  young  Protestant  who 
had  fought  the  Versaillais  because  they  had 
made  peace,  and  prevented  him  from  fighting 
the  Prussians."  J.  R.  G.  replied  that  the  only 
defense  of  a  man  who  fought  for  the  Com- 
mune was  that  he  believed  in  it,  while  Rossel, 
by  his  own  statement,  did  not. 

People  like  old  Delescluze  are  more  to  my 
mind,  men  who  believe,  rightly  or  wrongly  (in 
the  ideas  of  '93),  and  cling  to  their  faith  through 
thirteen  years  of  the  hulks  and  of  Cayenne, 
who  get  their  chance  at  last,  fight,  work,  and 
then  when  all  is  over  know  how  to  die — as 
Delescluze,  with  that  gray  head  bared  and  the 
old  threadbare  coat  thrown  open,  walked  quietly 
and  without  a  word  up  to  the  fatal  barricade. 

His  place  in  the  ranks  of  history  is  high 
and  safe.  That  was  abundantly  shown  by 
the  testimony  of  the  large  gathering  of 
English  scholars  and  historians  at  the  memo- 

,.-u  195 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

rial  meeting  held  in  his  own  college  some 
years  ago.  He  remains  as  one  of  the  leaders 
of  that  school  (there  is,  of  course,  another 
and  a  strong  one!)  which  holds  that  without 
imagination  and  personality  a  man  had  bet- 
ter not  write  history  at  all;  since  no  re- 
creation of  the  past  is  really  possible  withou't 
the  kindling  and  welding  force  that  a  man 
draws  from  his  own  spirit. 

But  it  is  as  a  friend  that  I  desire — with 
undying  love  and  gratitude — to  commem- 
orate him  here.  To  my  husband,  to  all  the 
motherless  family  he  had  taken  to  his  heart, 
he  was  affection  and  constancy  itself.  And 
as  for  me,  just  before  the  last  visit  that  we 
paid  him  at  Mentone  in  1882,  a  year  before 
he  died,  he  was  actually  thinking  out  schemes 
for  that  history  of  early  Spain  which  it 
seemed,  both  to  him  and  me,  I  must  at  last 
begin,  and  was  inquiring  what  help  I  could 
get  from  libraries  on  the  Riviera  during 
our  stay  with  him.  Then,  when  we  came, 
I  remember  our  talks  in  the  little  Villa  St. 
Nicholas — his  sympathy,  his  enthusiasm,  his 
unselfish  help;  while  all  the  time  he  was 
wrestling  with  death  for  just  a  few  more 
months  in  which  to  finish  his  own  work. 
Both  Lord  Bryce  and  Sir  Leslie  Stephen 
have  paid  their  tribute  to  this  wonderful 
talk  of  his  later  years.  "  No  such  talk,"  says 

196 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

Lord  Bryce,  "has  been  heard  in  our  genera- 
tion." Of  Madame  de  Stael  it  was  said  that 
she  wrote  her  books  out  of  the  talk  of  the 
distinguished  men  who  frequented  her  salon. 
Her  own  conversation  was  directed  to  evok- 
ing from  the  brains  of  others  what  she  after- 
ward, as  an  artist,  knew  how  to  use  better 
than  they.  Her  talk — small  blame  to  her! 
—was  plundering  and  acquisitive.  But  J. 
R.  G.'s  talk  gave  „  perpetually .  admirable 
listener  though  he  was.  All  that  he  had  he 
gave;  so  that  our  final  thought  of  him  is 
not  that  of  the  suffering  invalid,  the  thwarted 
workman,  the  life  cut  short,  but  rather  that 
of  one  who  had  richly  done  his  part  and  left 
in  his  friends'  memories  no  mere  pathetic 
appeal,  but  much  more  a  bracing  message 
for  their  own  easier  and  longer  lives. 

Of  the  two  other  historians  with  whom 
my  youth  threw  me  into  contact,  Mr.  Free- 
man and  Bishop  Stubbs,  I  have  some  lively 
memories.  Mr.  Freeman  was  first  known 
to  me,  I  think,  through  "  Johnny,"  as  he  was 
wont  to  call  J.  R.  G.,  whom  he  adored.  Both 
he  and  J.  R.  G.  were  admirable  letter- writers, 
and  a  volume  of  their  correspondence — much 
of  it  already  published  separately — if  it 
could  be  put  together — like  that  of  Flaubert 
and  George  Sand — would  make  excellent 

197 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

reading  for  a  future  generation.  In  1877 
and  1878,  when  I  was  plunged  in  the  history 
of  West-Gothic  Kings,  I  had  many  letters 
from  Mr.  Freeman,  and  never  were  letters 
about  grave  matters  less  grave.  Take  this 
outburst  about  a  lady  who  had  sent  him  some 
historical  work  to  look  at.  He  greatly  liked 
and  admired  the  lady;  but  her  work  drove 
him  wild.  "I  never  saw  anything  like  it  for 
missing  the  point  of  everything.  .  .  .  Then 
she  has  no  notion  of  putting  a  sentence  to- 
gether, so  that  she  said  some  things  which 
I  fancy  she  did  not  mean  to  say — as  that 
'the  beloved  Queen  Louisa  of  Prussia'  was 
the  mother  of  M.  Thiers.  When  she  said 
that  the  Duke  of  Orleans's  horses  ran  away, 
'leaving  two  infant  sons,'  it  may  have  been 
so:  I  have  no  evidence  either  way." 

Again,  "I  am  going  to  send  you  the  Spanish 
part  of  my  Historical  Geography.  It  will 
be  very  bad,  but — when  I  don't  know  a  thing 
I  believe  I  generally  know  that  I  don't 
know  it,  and  so  manage  to  wrap  it  up  in 
some  vague  phrase  which,  if  not  right,  may 
at  least  not  be  wrong.  Thus  I  have  always 
held  that  the  nursery  account  of  Henry 
VIII— 

And  Henry  the  Eighth  was  as  fat  as  a  pig — 
is  to  be  preferred  to  Froude's  version.    For, 

198 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

though  certainly  an  inadequate  account  of 
the  reign,  it  is  true  as  far  as  it  goes." 

Once,  certainly,  we  stayed  at  Somerleaze, 
and  I  retain  the  impression  of  a  very  busy, 
human,  energetic  man  of  letters,  a  good 
Churchman,  and  a  good  citizen,  brimful  of 
likes  and  dislikes,  and  waving  his  red  beard 
often  as  a  flag  of  battle  in  many  a  hot 
skirmish,  especially  with  J.  R.  G.,  but 
always  warm-hearted  and  generally  placable 
—except  in  the  case  of  James  Anthony 
Froude.  The  feud  between  Freeman  and 
Froude  was,  of  course,  a  standing  dish  in  the 
educated  world  of  half  a  century  ago.  It 
may  be  argued  that  the  Muse  of  History  has 
not  decided  the  quarrel  quite  according  to 
justice;  that  Clio  has  shown  herself  some- 
thing of  a  jade  in  the  matter,  as  easily 
influenced  by  fair  externals  as  a  certain 
Helen  was  long  ago.  How  many  people  now 
read  the  Norman  Conquest — except  the  few 
scholars  who  devote  themselves  to  the  same 
period?  Whereas  Froude's  History,  with 
all  its  sins,  lives,  and  in  my  belief  will  long 
live,  because  the  man  who  wrote  it  was  a 
writer  and  understood  his  art. 

Of  Bishop  Stubbs,  the  greatest  historical 
name  surely  in  the  England  of  the  last  half  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  I  did  not  personally 
see  much  while  we  lived  in  Oxford  and  he 

199 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

was  Regius  Professor.  He  had  no  gifts — it 
was  his  chief  weakness  as  a  teacher — for 
creating  a  young  school  around  him,  setting 
one  man  to  work  on  this  job,  and  another  on 
that,  as  has  been  done  with  great  success  in 
many  instances  abroad.  He  was  too  re- 
served, too  critical,  perhaps  too  sensitive. 
But  he  stood  as  a  great  influence  in  the  back- 
ground, felt  if  not  seen.  A  word  of  praise 
from  him  meant  everything;  a  word  of  con- 
demnation, in  his  own  subjects,  settled  the 
matter.  I  remember  well,  after  I  had  writ- 
ten a  number  of  articles  on  early  Spanish 
Kings  and  Bishops,  for  a  historical  Diction- 
ary, and  they  were  already  in  proof,  how 
on  my  daily  visits  to  the  Bodleian  I  began  to 
be  puzzled  by  the  fact  that  some  of  the  very 
obscure  books  I  had  been  using  were  "out" 
when  I  wanted  them,  or  had  been  abstracted 
from  my  table  by  one  of  the  sub-librarians. 
Joannes  Bidarensis — he  was  missing!  Who 
in  the  world  could  want  that  obscure  chron- 
icle of  an  obscure  period  but  myself?  I 
began  to  envisage  some  hungry  German 
Privatdozent,  on  his  holiday,  raiding  my  poor 
little  subject,  and  my  books,  with  a  view 
to  his  Doctor's  thesis.  Then  one  morning, 
as  I  went  in,  I  came  across  Doctor  Stubbs, 
with  an  ancient  and  portly  volume  under  his 

arm.    Joannes  Bidarensis  himself! — I  knew 

200 


it  at  once.  The  Professor  gave  me  a  friendly 
nod,  and  I  saw  a  twinkle  in  his  eye  as  we 
passed.  Going  to  my  desk,  I  found  another 
volume  gone — this  time  the  Acts  of  the 
Councils  of  Toledo.  So  far  as  I  knew,  not  the 
most  ardent  Churchman  in  Oxford  felt  at 
that  time  any  absorbing  interest  in  the 
Councils  of  Toledo.  At  any  rate,  I  had 
been  left  in  undisturbed  possession  of  them 
for  months.  Evidently  something  was  hap- 
pening, and  I  sat  down  to  my  work  in 
bewilderment. 

Then,  on  my  way  home,  I  ran  into  a  fellow- 
worker  for  the  Dictionary — a  well-known 
don  and  history  tutor.  "Do  you  know 
what's  happened?"  he  said,  in  excitement. 
"Stubbs  has  been  going  through  our  work! 
The  Editor  wanted  his  imprimatur  before 
the  final  printing.  Can't  expect  anybody 
but  Stubbs  to  know  all  these  things!  My 
books  are  gone,  too."  We  walked  up  to  the 
Parks  together  in  a  common  anxiety,  like  a 
couple  of  school-boys  in  for  Smalls.  Then 
in  a  few  days  the  tension  was  over;  my  books 
were  on  my  desk  again;  the  Professor 
stopped  me  in  the  Broad  with  a  smile,  and 
the  remark  that  Joannes  Biclarensis  was 
really  quite  an  interesting  fellow,  and  I  re- 
ceived a  very  friendly  letter  from  the  Editor 

of  the  Dictionary. 

201 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

And  perhaps  I  may  be  allowed,  after 
these  forty  years,  one  more  recollection, 
though  I  am  afraid  a  proper  reticence  would 
suppress  it!  A  little  later  "Mr.  Creighton" 
came  to  visit  us,  after  his  immigration  to 
Embleton  and  the  north ;  and  I  timidly  gave 
him  some  lives  of  West-Gothic  Kings  and 
Bishops  to  read.  He  read  them — they  were 
very  long  and  terribly  minute — and  put 
down  the  proofs,  without  saying  much. 
Then  he  walked  down  to  Oxford  with  my 
husband,  and  sent  me  back  a  message  by 
him:  "Tell  M.  to  go  on.  There  is  nobody 
but  Stubbs  doing  such  work  in  Oxford  now." 
The  thrill  of  pride  and  delight  such  words 
gave  me  may  be  imagined.  But  there  were 
already  causes  at  work  why  I  should  not 
"go  on." 

I  shall  have  more  to  say  presently  about 
the  work  on  the  origins  of  modern  Spain. 
It  was  the  only  thorough  "discipline"  I  ever 
had;  it  lasted  about  two  years — years  of 
incessant,  arduous  work,  and  it  led  directly 
to  the  writing  of  Robert  Elsmere.  But  before 
and  after,  how  full  life  was  of  other  things! 
The  joys  of  one's  new  home,  of  the  children 
that  began  to  patter  about  it,  of  every  bit  of 
furniture  and  blue  pot  it  contained,  each 

representing  some  happy  chasse  or  special 

202  " 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

earning — of  its  garden  of  half  an  acre,  where 
I  used  to  feel  as  Hawthorne  felt  in  the  gar- 
den of  the  Concord  Manse — amazement  that 
Nature  should  take  the  trouble  to  produce 
things  as  big  as  vegetable  marrows,  or  as 
surprising  as  scarlet  runners  that  topped  one's 
head,  just  that  we  might  own  and  eat  them. 
Then  the  life  of  the  University  town,  with 
all  those  marked  antagonisms  I  have  de- 
scribed, those  intellectual  and  religious  move- 
ments, that  were  like  the  meeting  currents  of 
rivers  in  a  lake;  and  the  pleasure  of  new 
friendships,  where  everybody  was  equal,  no- 
body was  rich,  and  the  intellectual  average 
was  naturally  high.  In  those  days,  too,  a 
small  group  of  women  of  whom  I  was  one 
were  laying  the  foundations  of  the  whole 
system  of  women's  education  in  Oxford. 
Mrs.  Creighton  and  I,  with  Mrs.  Max  Miil- 
ler,  were  the  secretaries  and  founders  of  the 
first  organized  series  of  lectures  for  women 
in  the  University  town;  I  was  the  first 
secretary  of  Somerville  Hall,  and  it  fell  to 
me,  by  chance,  to  suggest  the  name  of  the 
future  college.  My  friends  and  I  were  all 
on  fire  for  women's  education,  including 
women's  medical  education,  and  very  emu- 
lous of  Cambridge,  where  the  movement 
was  already  far  advanced. 
But  hardly  any  of  us  were  at  all  on  fire 

203 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

for  woman  suffrage,  wherein  the  Oxford  edu- 
cational movement  differed  greatly  from  the 
Cambridge  movement.  The  majority,  cer- 
tainly, of  the  group  to  which  I  belonged  at 
Oxford  were  at  that  time  persuaded  that  the 
development  of  women's  power  in  the  State 
— or  rather,  in  such  a  state  as  England,  with 
its  far-reaching  and  Imperial  obligations, 
resting  ultimately  on  the  sanction  of  war — 
— should  be  on  lines  of  its  own.  We  believed 
that  growth  through  Local  Government,  and 
perhaps  through  some  special  machinery  for 
bringing  the  wishes  and  influence  of  women 
of  all  classes  to  bear  on  Parliament,  other 
than  the  Parliamentary  vote,  was  the  real 
line  of  progress.  However,  I  shall  return 
to  this  subject  on  some  future  occasion,  in 
connection  with  the  intensified  suffragist 
campaign  which  began  about  ten  years  ago 
(1907-08)  and  in  which  I  took  some  part. 
I  will  only  note  here  my  first  acquaintance 
with  Mrs.  Fawcett.  I  see  her  so  clearly  as 
a  fresh,  picturesque  figure — in  a  green  silk 
dress  and  a  necklace  of  amber  beads,  when 
she  came  down  to  Oxford  in  the  mid-'seventies 
to  give  a  course  of  lectures  in  the  series  that 
Mrs.  Creighton  and  I  were  organizing,  and 
I  remember  well  the  atmosphere  of  sympathy 
and  admiration  which  surrounded  her  as  she 
spoke  to  an  audience  in  which  many  of  us 

204 


EARLY   MARRIED    LIFE 

were  well  acquainted  with  the  heroic  story 
of  Mr.  Fawcett's  blindness,  and  of  the  part 
played  by  his  wife  in  enabling  him  to  con- 
tinue his  economic  and  Parliamentary  work. 
But  life  then  was  not  all  lectures! — nor 
was  it  all  Oxford.  There  were  vacations,  and 
vacations  generally  meant  for  us  some  weeks, 
at  least,  of  travel,  even  when  pence  were 
fewest.  The  Christmas  vacation  of  1874 
we  were  in  Paris.  The  weather  was  bitter, 
and  we  were  lodged,  for  cheapness'  sake,  in 
an  old-fashioned  hotel,  where  the  high  cano- 
pied beds  with  their  mountainous  duvets 
were  very  difficult  to  wake  up  in  on  a  cold 
morning.  But  in  spite  of  snow  and  sleet 
we  filled  our  days  to  the  brim.  We  took 
with  us  some  introductions  from  Oxford— 
to  Madame  Mohl,  the  Renans,  the  Gaston 
Parises,  the  Boutmys,  the  Ribots,  and,  from 
my  Uncle  Matthew,  to  the  Scherers  at 
Versailles.  Monsieur  Taine  was  already 
known  to  us,  and  it  was  at  their  house,  on 
one  of  Madame  Taine's  Thursdays,  that  I 
first  heard  French  conversation  at  its  best. 
There  was  a  young  man  there,  dark-eyed, 
dark-haired,  to  whom  I  listened— not  always 
able  to  follow  the  rapid  French  in  which  he 
and  two  other  men  were  discussing  some 
literary  matter  of  the  moment,  but  conscious, 
for  the  first  time,  of  what  the  conversation  of 

205 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

intellectual  equals  might  be,  if  it  were  always 
practised  as  the  French  are  trained  to  practise 
it  from  their  mother's  milk,  by  the  influence 
of  a  long  tradition.  The  young  man  was 
M.  Paul  Bourget,  who  had  not  yet  begun 
to  write  novels,  while  his  literary  and 
philosophical  essays  seemed  rather  to  mark 
him  out  as  the  disciple  of  M.  Taine  than  as 
the  Catholic  protagonist  he  was  soon  to  be- 
come. M.  Bourget  did  not  then  speak 
English,  and  my  French  conversation,  which 
had  been  wholly  learned  from  books,  had  a 
way  at  that  time — and,  alack!  has  still — of 
breaking  down  under  me,  just  as  one  reached 
the  thing  one  really  wanted  to  say.  So  that 
I  did  not  attempt  to  do  more  than  listen. 
But  I  seem  to  remember  that  those  with 
whom  he  talked  were  M.  Francis  Charmes, 
then  a  writer  on  the  staff  of  the  Debats,  and 
afterward  the  editor  of  the  Revue  des  deux 
Mondes  in  succession  to  M.  Brunetiere;  and 
M.  Gaston  Paris,  the  brilliant  head  of  French 
philology  at  the  College  de  France.  What 
struck  me  then,  and  through  all  the  new 
experiences  and  new  acquaintanceships  of  our 
Christmas  fortnight,  wa's  that  strenuous  and 
passionate  intensity  of  the  French  temper, 
which  foreign  nations  so  easily  lose  sight  of, 
but  which,  in  truth,  is  as  much  part  of  the 
French  nature  as  their  gaiety,  or  as  what 

206 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

seems  to  us  their  frivolity.  The  war  of  1870, 
the  Commune,  were  but  three  years  behind 
them.  Germany  had  torn  from  them  Alsace- 
Lorraine;  she  had  occupied  Paris;  and  their 
own  Jacobins  had  ruined  and  burned  what 
even  Germany  had  spared.  In  the  minds  of 
the  intellectual  class  there  lay  deep,  on  the 
one  hand,  a  determination  to  rebuild  France; 
on  the  other,  to  avenge  her  defeat.  The 
blackened  ruins  of  the  Tuileries  and  of  the 
Cour  des  Comptes  still  disfigured  a  city 
which  grimly  kept  them  there  as  a  warning 
against  anarchy;  while  the  statue  of  the 
Ville  de  Strasbourg  in  the  Place  de  la  Con- 
corde had  worn  for  three  years  the  funeral 
garlands,  which,  as  France  confidently  hopes, 
the  peace  that  will  end  this  war  will,  after 
nearly  half  a  century,  give  way  once  more  to 
the  rejoicing  tricolor.  At  the  same  time 
reconstruction  was  everywhere  beginning — 
especially  in  the  field  of  education.  The  cor- 
rupt, political  influence  of  the  Empire,  which 
had  used  the  whole  educational  system  of  the 
country  for  the  purpose  of  keeping  itself  and 
its  supporters  in  ^ower,  was  at  an  end. 
The  recognized  "Ecole  Normale"  was  be- 
coming a  source  of  moral  and  mental  strength 
among  thousands  of  young  men  and  women; 
and  the  "Ecole  des  Sciences  politiques,"  the 
joint  work  of  Taine,  Renan,  and  M.  Boutmy, 

207 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

its  first  director,  was  laying  foundations 
whereof  the  results  are  to  be  seen  conspicu- 
ously to-day,  in  French  character,  French 
resource,  French  patience,  French  science,  as 
this  hideous  war  has  revealed  them. 

I  remember  an  illuminating  talk  with 
M.  Renan  himself  on  this  subject  during  our 
visit.  We  had  never  yet  seen  him,  and  we 
carried  an  introduction  to  him  from  Max 
Miiller,  our  neighbor  and  friend  in  Oxford. 
We  found  him  alone,  in  a  small  working- 
room  crowded  with  books,  at  the  College  de 
France.  Madame  Renan  was  away,  and  he 
had  abandoned  his  large  library  for  some- 
thing more  easily  warmed.  My  first  sight  of 
him  was  something  of  a  shock — of  the  large, 
ungainly  figure,  the  genial  face  with  its 
spreading  cheeks  and  humorous  eyes,  the 
big  head  with  its  scanty  locks  of  hair.  I 
think  he  felt  an  amused  and  kindly  interest 
in  the  two  young  folk  from  Oxford  who  had 
come  as  pilgrims  to  his  shrine,  and,  realizing 
that  our  French  was  not  fluent  and  our  shy- 
ness great,  he  filled  up  the  time — and  the 
gaps — by  a  monologue,  lit  up  by  many 
touches  of  Renanesque  humor,  on  the  situa- 
tion in  France. 

First,  as  to  literature — "No,  we  have  no 
genius,  no  poets  or  writers  of  the  first  rank 
just  now — at  least  so  it  seems  to  me.  But  we 

208 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

work  —  nous  travaillons  beaucoupf  Ce  sera 
notre  salut."  It  was  the  same  as  to  politics. 
He  had  no  illusions  and  few  admirations. 
"The  Chamber  is  full  of  mediocrities.  We 
are  governed  by  avocats  and  pharmadens. 
But  at  least  Us  ne  feront  pas  la  guerre!" 

He  smiled,  but  there  was  that  in  the 
smile  and  the  gesture  which  showed  the 
smart  within;  from  which  not  even  his 
scholar's  philosophy,  with  its  ideal  of  a 
world  of  cosmopolitan  science,  could  protect 
him.  At  that  moment  he  was  inclined  to 
despair  of  his  country.  The  mad  adventure 
of  the  Commune  had  gone  deep  into  his 
soul,  and  there  were  still  a  good  many  pacify- 
ing years  to  run,  before  he  could  talk  of  his 
life  as  "cette  charmante  promenade  a  tr avers  la 
realite" — for  which,  with  all  it  had  contained 
of  bad  and  good,  he  yet  thanked  the  Gods. 
At  that  time  he  was  fifty-one;  he  had  just 
published  L' Antichrist,  the  most  brilliant 
of  all  the  volumes  of  the  "Origines";  and 
he  was  not  yet  a  member  of  the  French 
Academy. 

I  turn  to  a  few  other  impressions  from  that 
distant  time.  One  night  we  were  in  the 
Theatre  Frangais,  and  Racine's  "Phedre" 
was  to  be  given.  I  at  least  had  never  been 
in  the  Maison  de  Moliere  before,  and  in  such 
matters  as  acting  I  possessed,  at  twenty- 

209 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

three,  only  a  very  raw  and  country-cousinish 
judgment.  There  had  been  a  certain  amount 
of  talk  in  Oxford  of  a  new  and  remarkable 
French  actress,  but  neither  of  us  had  really 
any  idea  of  what  was  before  us.  Then  the 
play  began.  And  before  the  first  act  was 
over  we  were  sitting,  bent  forward,  gazing 
at  the  stage  in  an  intense  and  concentrated 
excitement  such  as  I  can  scarcely  remember 
ever  feeling  again,  except  perhaps  when  the 
same  actress  played  "Hernani"  in  London 
for  the  first  time  in  1884.  Sarah  Bernhardt 
was  then — December,  1874 — in  the  first  full 
tide  of  her  success.  She  was  of  a  ghostly 
and  willowy  slenderness.  Each  of  the  great 
speeches  seemed  actually  to  rend  the  delicate 
frame.  When  she  fell  back  after  one  of  them 
you  felt  an  actual  physical  terror  lest  there 
should  not  be  enough  life  left  in  the  slight, 
dying  woman  to  let  her  speak  again.  And 
you  craved  for  yet  more  and  more  of  the 
voix  d'or  which  rang  in  one's  ears  as  the 
frail  yet  exquisite  instrument  of  a  mighty 
music.  Never  before  had  it  been  brought 
home  to  me  what  dramatic  art  might  be,  or 
the  power  of  the  French  Alexandrine.  And 
never  did  I  come  so  near  quarreling  with 
" Uncle  Matt"  as  when,  on  our  return,  after 
having  heard  my  say  about  the  genius  of 

Sarah  Bernhardt,  he  patted  my  hand  in- 

210 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

dulgently  with  the  remark,  "But,  my  dear 
child,  you  see,  you  never  saw  Rachel!" 

As  we  listened  to  Sarah  Bernhardt  we 
were  watching  the  outset  of  a  great  career 
which  had  still  some  forty  years  to  run. 
On  another  evening  we  made  acquaintance 
with  a  little  old  woman  who  had  been  born 
in  the  first  year  of  the  Terror,  who  had  spent 
her  first  youth  in  the  salon  of  Madame 
Recamier,  valued  there,  above  all,  for  her 
difficult  success  in  drawing  a  smile  from  that 
old  and  melancholy  genius,  Chateaubriand; 
and  had  since  held  a  salon  of  her  own,  which 
deserves  a  special  place  in  the  history  of 
salons.  For  it  was  held,  according  to  the 
French  tradition,  and  in  Paris,  by  an  Eng- 
lishwoman. It  was,  I  think,  Max  Miiller 
who  gave  us  an  introduction  to  Madame 
Mohl.  She  sent  us  an  invitation  to  one  of 
her  Friday  evenings,  and  we  duly  mounted 
to  the  top  of  the  old  house  in  the  Rue  du 
Bac  which  she  made  famous  for  so  long. 
As  we  entered  the  room  I  saw  a  small  di- 
sheveled figure,  gray-headed,  crouching  be- 
side a  grate,  with  a  kettle  in  her  hand.  It 
was  Madame  Mohl — then  eighty-one — who 
was  trying  to  make  the  fire  burn.  She  just 
raised  herself  to  greet  us,  with  a  swift  in- 
vestigating glance;  and  then  returned  to  her 
task  of  making  the  tea,  in  which  I  endeavored 

I.-15  211 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

to  help  her.  But  she  did  not  like  to  be 
helped,  and  I  soon  subsided  into  my  usual 
listening  and  watching,  which,  perhaps,  for 
one  who  at  that  time  was  singularly  imma- 
ture in  all  social  respects,  was  the  best 
policy.  I  seem  still  to  see  the  tall,  sub- 
stantial form  of  Julius  Mohl  standing  be- 
hind her,  with  various  other  elderly  men  who 
were  no  doubt  famous  folk,  if  one  had  known 
their  names.  And  in  the  corner  was  the 
Spartan  tea-table,  with  its  few  biscuits, 
which  stood  for  the  plain  living  whereon 
was  nourished  the  high  thinking  and  high 
talking  which  had  passed  through  these 
rooms.  Guizot,  Cousin,  Ampere,  Fauriel, 
Mignet,  Lamartine,  all  the  great  men  of  the 
middle  century  had  talked  there;  not,  in 
general,  the  poets  and  the  artists,  but  the 
politicians,  the  historians,  and  the  savants. 
The  little  Fairy  Blackstick,  incredibly  old, 
kneeling  on  the  floor,  with  the  shabby  dress 
and  tousled  gray  hair,  had  made  a  part  of 
the  central  scene  in  France,  through  the 
Revolution,  the  reign  of  the  Citizen  king, 
and  the  Second  Empire — playing  the  role, 
through  it  all,  of  a  good  friend  of  freedom. 
If  only  one  had  heard  her  talk!  But  there 
were  few  people  in  the  room,  and  we  were 
none  of  us  inspired.  I  must  sadly  put  down 

that  Friday  evening  among  the  lost  oppor- 

212 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

tunities  of  life.  For  Mrs.  Simpson's  biog- 
raphy of  Madame  Mohl  shows  what  a  wealth 
of  wit  and  memory  there  was  in  that  small 
head!  Her  social  sense,  her  humor,  never 
deserted  her,  though  she  lived  to  be  ninety. 
When  she  was  dying,  her  favorite  cat,  a  torn, 
leaped  on  her  bed.  Her  eyes  lit  up  as  she 
feebly  stroked  him.  "He  is  so  distin- 
guished!" she  whispered.  "But  his  wife  is 
not  distinguished  at  all.  He  doesn't  know 
it.  But  many  men  are  like  that."  It  was 
one  of  the  last  sayings  of  an  expert  in  the 
human  scene. 

Madame  Mohl  was  twenty-one  when  the 
Allies  entered  Paris  in  1814.  She  had  lived 
with  those  to  whom  the  fall  of  the  Ancien 
Regime,  the  Terror,  and  the  Revolutionary 
wars  had  been  the  experience  of  middle  life. 
As  I  look  back  to  the  salon  in  the  Rue  du 
Bac,  which  I  saw  in  such  a  flash,  yet  where 
my  hand  rested  for  a  moment  in  that  of 
Madame  Re"camier's  pet  and  protegee,  I  am 
reminded,  too,  that  I  once  saw,  at  the 
Forsters',  in  1869,  when  I  was  eighteen,  the 
Doctor  Lushington  who  was  Lady  Byron's 
adviser  and  confidant  when  she  left  her 
husband,  and  who,  as  a  young  man,  had 
stayed  with  Pitt  and  ridden  out  with  Lady 
Hester  Stanhope.  One  night,  in  Eccleston 

Square,    we   assembled   for   dinner   in   the 

213 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

ground-floor  library  instead  of  the  drawing- 
room,  which  was  up-stairs.  I  slipped  in  late, 
and  saw  in  an  arm-chair,  his  hands  resting 
on  a  stick,  an  old,  white-haired  man.  When 
dinner  was  announced — if  I  remember  right 

—he  was  wheeled  into  the  dining-room,  to  a 
place  beside  my  aunt.  I  was  too  far  away 
to  hear  him  talk,  and  he  went  home  after 
dinner.  But  it  was  one  of  the  guests  of  the 
evening,  a  friend  of  his,  who  said  to  me— 
with  a  kindly  wish,  no  doubt,  to  thrill  the 
girl  just  "out":  "You  ought  to  remember 
Doctor  Lushington!  What  are  you? — eigh- 
teen?— and  he  is  eighty-six.  He  was  in  the 
theater  on  the  night  when  the  news  reached 
London  of  Marie  Antoinette's  execution,  and 
he  can  remember,  though  he  was  only  a  boy 
of  eleven,  how  it  was  given  out  from  the 
stage,  and  how  the  audience  instantly  broke 
up." 

Doctor  Lushington,  of  course,  carries  one 
farther  back  than  Madame  Mohl.  He  was 
born  in  1782,  four  years  after  the  deaths  of 
Rousseau  and  Voltaire,  two  years  before  the 
death  of  Diderot.  He  was  only  six  years 
younger  than  Lady  Hester  Stanhope,  whose 
acquaintance  he  made  during  the  three  years 

—1803-1806 — when  she  was  keeping  house 
for  her  uncle,  William  Pitt. 

But  on  my  right  hand  at  the  same  dinner- 

214 


EARLY    MARRIED    LIFE 

party  there  sat  a  guest  who  was  to  mean  a 
good  deal  more  to  me  personally  than  Doctor 
Lushington — young  Mr.  George  Otto  Tre- 
velyan,  as  he  then  was,  Lord  Macaulay's 
nephew,  already  the  brilliant  author  of 
A  Competition  Wallah,  Ladies  in  Parliament, 
and  much  else.  We  little  thought,  as  we 
talked,  that  after  thirty-five  years  his  son 
was  to  marry  my  daughter. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  BEGINNINGS  OF  ROBERT  ELSMERE 

IF  these  are  to  be  the  recollections  of  a 
*  writer,  in  which  perhaps  other  writers  by 
profession,  as  well  as  the  more  general  pub- 
lic, may  take  some  interest,  I  shall  perhaps 
be  forgiven  if  I  give  some  account  of  the 
processes  of  thought  and  work  which  led  to 
the  writing  of  my  first  successful  novel, 
Robert  Elsmere. 

It  was  in  1878  that  a  new  editor  was  ap- 
pointed for  one  of  the  huge  well-known  vol- 
umes, in  which  under  the  aegis  of  the  John 
Murray  of  the  day,  the  Nineteenth  Century 
was  accustomed  to  concentrate  its  knowledge 
— classical,  historical,  and  theological — in 
convenient,  if  not  exactly  handy,  form. 
Doctor  Wace,  now  a  Canon  of  Canterbury, 
was  then  an  indefatigable  member  of  the 
Times  staff.  Yet  he  undertook  this  extra 
work,  and  carried  it  bravely  through.  He 
came  to  Oxford  to  beat  up  recruits  for 
Smith's  Dictionary  of  Christian  Biography,  a 
companion  volume  to  that  of  Classical  Biog- 
raphy, and  dealing  with  the  first  seven  cen- 
turies of  Christianity.  He  had  been  told 

216 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT   ELSMERE 

that  I  had  been  busying  myself  with  early 
Spain,  and  he  came  to  me  to  ask  whether 
I  would  take  the  Spanish  lives  for  the 
period,  especially  those  concerned  with  the 
West-Goths  in  Spain;  while  at  the  same 
time  he  applied  to  various  Oxford  histori- 
ans for  work  on  the  Ostrogoths  and  the 
Franks. 

I  was  much  tempted,  but  I  had  a  good  deal 
to  consider.  The  French  and  Spanish  read- 
ing it  involved  was  no  difficulty.  But  the 
power  of  reading  Latin  rapidly,  both  the  de- 
graded Latin  of  the  fifth  and  sixth  centuries 
and  the  learned  Latin  of  the  sixteenth  and 
seventeenth,  was  essential;  and  I  had  only 
learned  some  Latin  since  my  marriage,  and 
was  by  no  means  at  home  in  it.  I  had  long 
since  found  out,  too,  in  working  at  the 
Spanish  literature  of  the  eleventh  to  the 
fourteenth  century,  that  the  only  critics  and 
researches  worth  following  in  that  field 
were  German;  and  though  I  had  been  fairly 
well  grounded  in  German  at  school,  and  had 
read  a  certain  amount,  the  prospect  of  a 
piece  of  work  which  meant,  in  the  main, 
Latin  texts  and  German  commentaries,  was 
rather  daunting.  The  well-trained  woman 
student  of  the  present  day  would  have  felt 
probably  no  such  qualms.  But  I  had  not 
been  well  trained;  and  the  Pattison  stand- 

217 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

ards  of  what  work  should  be  stood  like 
dragons  in  the  way. 

However,  I  took  the  plunge,  and  I  have 
always  been  grateful  to  Canon  Wace.  The 
sheer,  hard,  brain-stretching  work  of  the  two 
or  three  years  which  followed  I  look  back 
to  now  with  delight.  It  altered  my  whole 
outlook  and  gave  me  horizons  and  sym- 
pathies that  I  have  never  lost,  however  dim 
all  the  positive  knowledge  brought  me  by  the 
work  has  long  since  become.  The  strange 
thing  was  that  out  of  the  work  which  seemed 
both  to  myself  and  others  to  mark  the 
abandonment  of  any  foolish  hopes  of  novel- 
writing  I  might  have  cherished  as  a  girl, 
Robert  Elsmere  should  have  arisen.  For 
after  my  marriage  I  had  made  various  at- 
tempts to  write  fiction.  They  were  clearly 
failures.  J.  R.  G.  dealt  very  faithfully  with 
me  on  the  subject;  and  I  could  only  conclude 
that  the  instinct  to  tell  stories  which  had 
been  so  strong  in  me  as  a  child  and  girl 
meant  nothing,  and  was  to  be  suppressed. 
I  did,  indeed,  write  a  story  for  my  children, 
which  came  out  in  1880 — Milly  and  Oily;  but 
that  wrote  itself  and  was  a  mere  transcript 
of  their  little  lives. 

And  yet  I  venture  to  think  it  was,  after 
all,  the  instinct  for  " making  out,"  as  the 

Brontes  used   to  call  their  own  wonderful 

218 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT   ELSMERE 

story-telling  passion,  which  rendered  this  his- 
torical work  so  enthralling  to  me.  Those 
far-off  centuries  became  veritably  alive  to 
me — the  Arian  kings  fighting  an  ever-losing 
battle  against  the  ever-encroaching  power  of 
the  Catholic  Church,  backed  by  the  still 
lingering  and  still  potent  ghost  of  the  Roman 
Empire;  the  Catholic  Bishops  gathering, 
sometimes  through  winter  snow,  to  their 
Councils  at  Seville  and  Toledo;  the  centers 
of  culture  in  remote  corners  of  the  peninsula, 
where  men  lived  with  books  and  holy  things, 
shrinking  from  the  wild  life  around  them, 
and  handing  on  the  precious  remnants  and 
broken  traditions  of  the  older  classical  world; 
the  mutual  scorn  of  Goth  and  Roman; 
martyrs,  fanatics,  heretics,  nationalists,  and 
cosmopolitans;  and,  rising  upon,  enveloping 
them  all,  as  the  seventh  and  eighth  cen- 
turies drew  on,  the  tide  of  Islam,  and  the 
menace  of  that  time  when  the  great  church 
of  Cordova  should  be  half  a  mosque  and 
half  a  Christian  cathedral. 

I  lived,  indeed,  in  that  old  Spain,  while  I 
was  at  work  in  the  Bodleian  and  at  home. 
To  spend  hours  and  days  over  the  signatures 
to  an  obscure  Council,  identifying  each 
name  so  far  as  the  existing  materials  allowed, 
and  attaching  to  it  some  fragment  of  human 

interest,  so  that  gradually  something  of  a 

219 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

picture  emerged,  as  of  a  thing  lost  and 
recovered — dredged  up  from  the  deeps  of 
time — that,  I  think,  was  the  joy  of  it 
aU. 

I  see,  in  memory,  the  small  Oxford  room, 
as  it  was  on  a  winter  evening,  between  nine 
and  midnight,  my  husband  in  one  corner 
preparing  his  college  lectures,  or  writing  a 
"Saturday"  "middle";  my  books  and  I  in 
another;  the  reading-lamp,  always  to  me  a 
symbol  of  peace  and  "recollection";  the 
Oxford  quiet  outside.  And  yet,  it  was  not 
so  tranquil  as  it  looked.  For  beating  round 
us  all  the  time  were  the  spiritual  winds  of  an 
agitated  day.  The  Oxford  of  thought  was 
not  quiet;  it  was  divided,  as  I  have  shown, 
by  sharper  antagonisms  and  deeper  feuds  than 
exist  to-day.  Darwinism  was  penetrating 
everywhere;  Pusey  was  preaching  against  its 
effects  on  belief;  Balliol  stood  for  an  un- 
fettered history  and  criticism,  Christ  Church 
for  authority  and  creeds;  Kenan's  Origines 
were  still  coming  out,  Strauss's  last  book  also; 
my  uncle  was  publishing  God  and  the  Bible 
in  succession  to  Literature  and  Dogma;  and 
Supernatural  Religion  was  making  no  small 
stir.  And  meanwhile  what  began  to  interest 
and  absorb  me  were  sources — testimony.  To 
what — to  whom — did  it  all  go  back,  this 
great  story  of  early  civilization,  early  religion, 

220 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF   ROBERT   ELSMERE 

which  modern  men  could  write  and  interpret 
so  differently? 

And  on  this  question  the  writers  and  his- 
torians of  four  early  centuries,  from  the  fifth 
to  the  ninth,  as  I  lived  with  them,  seemed 
to  throw  a  partial,  but  yet  a  searching,  light. 
I  have  expressed  it  in  Robert  Elsmere. 
Langham  and  Robert,  talking  in  the  Squire's 
library  on  Robert's  plans  for  a  history  of 
Gaul  during  the  breakdown  of  the  Empire 
and  the  emergence  of  modern  France,  come 
to  the  vital  question:  " History  depends  on 
testimony.  What  is  the  nature  and  virtue  of 
testimony  at  given  times?  In  other  words, 
did  the  man  of  the  third  century  understand, 
or  report,  or  interpret  facts  in  the  same  way 
as  the  man  of  the  sixteenth  or  the  nineteenth? 
And  if  not,  what  are  the  differences?—  and 
what  are  the  deductions  to  be  made  irom 
them?" 

Robert  replies  that  his  work  has  not  yet 
dug  deep  enough  to  make  him  answer  the 
question. 

"It  is  enormously  important,  I  grant — 
enormously,"  he  repeated,  reflectively. 

On  which  Langham  says  to  himself,  though 
not  to  Elsmere,  that  the  whole  of  "ortho- 
doxy" is  in  it,  and  depends  on  it. 

And  in  a  later  passage,  when  Elsmere  is 

mastering  the  "Quellen"  of  his  subject,  he 

221 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

expresses  himself  with  bewilderment  to  Cath- 
erine on  this  same  subject  of  "  testimony." 
He  is  immersed  in  the  chronicles  and  biog- 
raphies of  the  fifth  and  sixth  centuries. 
Every  history,  every  biography,  is  steeped 
in  marvel.  A  man  divided  by  only  a  few 
years  from  the  bishop  or  saint  whose  life  he 
is  writing  reports  the  most  fantastic  miracles. 
What  is  the  psychology  of  it  all?  The  whole 
age  seems  to  Robert  "non-sane."  And, 
meanwhile,  across  and  beyond  the  medieval 
centuries,  behind  the  Christian  era  itself,  the 
modern  student  looks  back  inevitably,  in- 
voluntarily, to  certain  Greeks  and  certain 
Latins,  who  "represent  a  forward  strain," 
who  intellectually  "belong  to  a  world  ahead 
of  them."  "You" — he  says  to  them — "you 
are  really  my  kindred." 

That,  after  all,  I  tried  to  express  this  in- 
tellectual experience — which  was,  of  course, 
an  experience  of  my  own — not  in  critical  or 
historical  work,  but  in  a  novel,  that  is  to  say 
in  terms  of  human  life,  was  the  result  of  an 
incident  which  occurred  toward  the  close  of 
our  lives  in  Oxford.  It  was  not  long  after 
the  appearance  of  Supernatural  Religion,  and 
the  rise  of  that  newer  school  of  Biblical 
criticism  in  Germany  expressed  by  the  once- 
honored  name  of  Doctor  Harnack.  Dar- 
winian debate  in  the  realm  of  natural  science 

222 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT    ELSMERE 

was  practically  over.  The  spread  of  evolu- 
tionary ideas  in  the  fields  of  history  and 
criticism  was  the  real  point  of  interest.  Ac- 
cordingly, the  University  pulpit  was  often 
filled  by  men  endeavoring  "  to  fit  a  not  very 
exacting  science  to  a  very  grudging  ortho- 
doxy"; and  the  heat  of  an  ever-strengthen- 
ing controversy  was  in  the  Oxford  air. 

In  1881,  as  it  happened,  the  Bampton 
Lectures  were  preached  by  the  Rev.  John 
Wordsworth,  then  Fellow  and  Tutor  of 
Brasenose,  and,  later,  Bishop  of  Salisbury. 
He  and  my  husband — who,  before  our  mar- 
riage, was  also  a  Fellow  of  Brasenose — were 
still  tutorial  colleagues,  and  I  therefore  knew 
him  personally,  and  his  first  wife,  the  brilliant 
daughter  of  the  beloved  Bodley's  Librarian 
of  my  day,  Mr.  Coxe.  We  naturally  at- 
tended Mr.  Wordsworth's  first  Bampton. 
He  belonged,  very  strongly,  to  what  I  have 
called  the  Christ  Church  camp;  while  we 
belonged,  very  strongly,  to  the  Balliol  camp. 
But  no  one  could  fail  to  respect  John  Words- 
worth deeply;  while  his  connection  with  his 
great-uncle,  the  poet,  to  whom  he  bore  a 
strong  personal  likeness,  gave  him  always  a 
glamour  in  my  eyes.  Still,  I  remember 
going  with  a  certain  shrinking;  and  it 
was  the  shock  of  indignation  excited  in  me 
by  the  sermon  which  led  directly — though 

•  223 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

after    seven    intervening    years — to    Robert 
Elsmere. 

The  sermon  was  on  "The  present  unsettle- 
ment  in  religion";  and  it  connected  the 
"unsettlement"  definitely  with  "sin."  The 
"moral  causes  of  unbelief,"  said  the  preacher, 
"were  (1)  prejudice;  (2)  severe  claims  of 
religion;  (3)  intellectual  faults,  especially 
indolence,  coldness,  recklessness,  pride,  and 


avarice." 


The  sermon  expounded  and  developed  this 
outline  with  great  vigor,  and  every  skeptical 
head  received  its  due  buffeting  in  a  tone  and 
fashion  that  now  scarcely  survive.  I  sat  in 
the  darkness  under  the  gallery.  The  preach- 
er's fine  ascetic  face  was  plainly  visible  in  the 
middle  light  of  the  church;  and  while  the 
confident  priestly  voice  flowed  on,  I  seemed 
to  see,  grouped  around  the  speaker,  the  forms 
of  those,  his  colleagues  and  contemporaries, 
the  patient  scholars  and  thinkers  of  the 
Liberal  host,  Stanley,  Jowett,  Green  of 
Balliol,  Lewis  Nettleship,  Henry  Sidgwick, 
my  uncle,  whom  he,  in  truth — though  per- 
haps not  consciously — was  attacking.  My 
heart  was  hot  within  me.  How  could  one 
show  England  what  was  really  going  on  in 
her  midst?  Surely  the  only  way  was  through 
imagination;  through  a  picture  of  actual 

}ife   and   conduct;     through   something   as 

224 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT   ELSMERE 

" simple,  sensuous,  passionate"  as  one  could 
make  it.  Who  and  what  were  the  persons 
of  whom  the  preacher  gave  this  grotesque 
account?  What  was  their  history?  How 
had  their  thoughts  and  doubts  come  to  be? 
What  was  the  effect  of  them  on  conduct? 

The  immediate  result  of  the  sermon,  how- 
ever, was  a  pamphlet  called  Unbelief  and  Sin: 
a  Protest  addressed  to  those  who  attended  the 
Bampton  Lecture  of  Sunday,  March  6th.  It 
was  rapidly  written  and  printed,  and  was  put 
up  in  the  windows  of  a  well-known  shop  in 
the  High  Street.  In  the  few  hours  of  its 
public  career  it  enjoyed  a  very  lively  sale. 
Then  an  incident — quite  unforeseen  by  its 
author — slit  its  little  life!  A  well-known 
clergyman  walked  into  the  shop  and  asked 
for  the  pamphlet.  He  turned  it  over,  and 
at  once  pointed  out  to  one  of  the  partners 
of  the  firm  in  the  shop  that  there  was  no 
printer's  name  upon  it.  The  booksellers  who 
had  produced  the  pamphlet,  no  doubt  with 
an  eye  to  their  large  clerical  clientele,  had 
omitted  the  printer's  name,  and  the  omission 
was  illegal.  Pains  and  penalties  were  threat- 
ened, and  the  frightened  booksellers  at  once 
withdrew  the  pamphlet  and  sent  word  of 
what  had  happened  to  my  much-astonished 
self,  who  had  neither  noticed  the  omission 
nor  was  aware  of  the  law.  But  Doctor 

225 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

Foulkes,  the  clergyman  in  question — no  one 
that  knew  the  Oxford  of  my  day  will  have 
forgotten  his  tall,  militant  figure,  with  the 
defiant  white  hair  and  the  long  clerical  coat, 
as  it  haunted  the  streets  of  the  University! — 
had  only  stimulated  the  tare  he  seemed  to 
have  rooted  up.  For  the  pamphlet  thus 
easily  suppressed  was  really  the  germ  of  the 
later  book;  in  that,  without  attempting 
direct  argument,  it  merely  sketched  two 
types  of  character:  the  character  that  either 
knows  no  doubts  or  has  suppressed  them, 
and  the  character  that  fights  its  stormy  way 
to  truth. 

The  latter  was  the  first  sketch  of  Robert 
Elsmere.  That  same  evening,  at  a  College 
party,  Professor  Green  came  up  to  me.  I 
had  sent  him  the  pamphlet  the  night  before, 
and  had  not  yet  had  a  word  from  him.  His 
kind  brown  eyes  smiled  upon  me  as  he  said 
a  hearty  "thank  you,"  adding  "a  capital 
piece  of  work,"  or  something  to  that  effect; 
after  which  my  spirits  were  quite  equal  to 
telling  him  the  story  of  Doctor  Foulkes's  raid. 

The  year  1880-81,  however,  was  marked 
for  me  by  three  other  events  of  quite  a  dif- 
ferent kind:  Monsieur  Kenan's  visit  to  Ox- 
ford, my  husband's  acceptance  of  a  post  on 
the  staff  of  the  Times,  and  a  visit  that  we 

226 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT    ELSMERE 

paid  to  the  W.  E.  Forsters  in  Ireland,  in 
December,  1880,  at  almost  the  blackest  mo- 
ment of  the  Irish  land-war. 

Of  Kenan's  visit  I  have  mingled  memories 
— all  pleasant,  but  some  touched  with  com- 
edy. Gentle  Madame  Renan  came  with  her 
famous  husband  and  soon  won  all  hearts. 
Oxford  in  mid-April  was  then,  as  always,  a 
dream  of  gardens  just  coming  into  leaf,  en- 
chasing buildings  of  a  silvery  gray,  and  full 
to  the  brim  of  the  old  walls  with  the  early 
blossom — almond,  or  cherry,  or  flowering 
currant.  M.  Renan  was  delivering  the  Hib- 
bert  Lectures  in  London,  and  came  down  to 
stay  for  a  long  week-end  with  our  neighbors, 
the  Max  MiiUers.  Doctor  Hatch  was  then 
preaching  the  Bampton  Lectures,  that  first 
admirable  series  of  his  on  the  debt  of  the 
Church  to  Latin  organization,  and  M.  Renan 
attended  one  of  them.  He  had  himself  just 
published  Marc  Aurek,  and  Doctor  Hatch's 
subject  was  closely  akin  to  that  of  his  own 
Hibbert  Lectures.  I  remember  seeing  him 
emerge  from  the  porch  of  St.  Mary's,  his 
strange,  triangular  face  pleasantly  dreamy. 
"You  were  interested?"  said  some  one  at 
his  elbow.  "Mais  oui!"  said  M.  Renan, 
smiling.  "He  might  have  given  my  lecture, 
and  I  might  have  preached  his  sermon! 
(Nous  aurions  du  changer  de  cahiers!)"  Re- 

,.-16  227 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

nan  in  the  pulpit  of  Pusey,  Newman,  and 
Burgon  would  indeed  have  been  a  spectacle 
of  horror  to  the  ecclesiastical  mind.  I  re- 
member once,  many  years  after,  following 
the  parroco  of  Castel  Gandolfo,  through  the 
dreary  and  deserted  rooms  of  the  Papal  villa, 
where,  before  1870,  the  Popes  used  to  make 
villegiatura,  on  that  beautiful  ridge  over- 
looking the  Alban  lake.  All  the  decoration 
of  the  villa  seemed  to  me  curiously  tawdry 
and  mean.  But  suddenly  my  attention  was 
arrested  by  a  great  fresco  covering  an  entire 
wall.  It  represented  the  triumph  of  the 
Papacy  over  the  infidel  of  all  dates.  A  Pope 
sat  enthroned,  wearing  the  triple  crown,  with 
angels  hovering  overhead;  and  in  a  huge 
brazier  at  his  feet  burned  the  writings  of  the 
world's  heretics.  The  blazing  volumes  were 
inscribed  —  Arius  —  Luther  —  Voltaire  — 
Renan! 

We  passed  on  through  the  empty  rooms, 
and  the  parroco  locked  the  door  behind  us. 
I  thought,  as  we  walked  away,  of  the  summer 
light  fading  from  the  childish  picture,  painted 
probably  not  long  before  the  entry  of  the 
Italian  troops  into  Rome,  and  of  all  that 
was  symbolized  by  it  and  the  deserted  villa, 
to  which  the  "prisoner  of  the  Vatican"  no 
longer  returns.  But  at  least  Rome  had 
given  Ernest  Renan  no  mean  place  among 

228 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT   ELSMERE 

her  enemies — Arius,  Luther,  Voltaire — 
Renan! 

But  in  truth,  Renan,  personally,  was  not 
the  enemy  of  any  church,  least  of  all  of  the 
great  Church  which  had  trained  his  youth. 
He  was  a  born  scholar  and  thinker,  in  temper 
extremely  gentle  and  scrupulous,  and  with 
a  sense  of  humor,  or  rather  irony,  not  unlike 
that  of  Anatole  France,  who  has  learned 
much  from  him.  There  was,  of  course,  a 
streak  in  him  of  that  French  paradox,  that 
impish  trifling  with  things  fundamental, 
which  the  English  temperament  dislikes  and 
resents;  as  when  he  wrote  the  Abbesse  de 
Jouarre,  or  threw  out  the  whimsical  doubt 
in  a  passing  sentence  of  one  of  his  latest 
books,  whether,  after  all,  his  life  of  labor 
and  self-denial  had  been  worth  while,  and 
whether,  if  he  had  lived  the  life  of  an  Epi- 
curean, like  Theophile  Gautier,  he  might  not 
have  got  more  out  of  existence.  "He  was 
really  a  good  and  great  man,"  said  Jowett, 
writing  after  his  death.  But  "I  regret  that 
he  wrote  at  the  end  of  his  life  that  strange 
drama  about  the  Reign  of  Terror." 

There  are  probably  few  of  M.  Renan's 
English  admirers  who  do  not  share  the  re- 
gret. At  the  same  time,  there,  for  all  to  see, 
is  the  long  life  as  it  was  lived — of  the  ever- 
toiling  scholar  and  thinker,  the  devoted  hus- 

229 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

band  and  brother,  the  admirable  friend. 
And  certainly,  during  the  Oxford  visit  I  re- 
member, M.  Renan  was  at  his  best.  He 
was  in  love — apparently — with  Oxford,  and 
his  charm,  his  gaiety,  played  over  all  that  we 
presented  to  him.  I  recall  him  in  Wadham 
Gardens,  wandering  in  a  kind  of  happy 
dream — "Ah,  if  one  had  only  such  places  as 
this  to  work  in,  in  France!  What  pages 
— and  how  perfect! — one  might  write  here!" 
Or  again,  in  a  different  scene,  at  luncheon 
in  our  little  house  in  the  Parks,  when  Oxford 
was  showing,  even  more  than  usual,  its 
piteous  inability  to  talk  decently  to  the  great 
man  in  his  own  tongue.  It  is  true  that  he 
neither  understood  ours — in  conversation — 
nor  spoke  a  word  of  it.  But  that  did  not  at 
all  mitigate  our  own  shame — and  surprise! 
For  at  that  time,  in  the  Oxford  world  proper, 
everybody,  probably,  read  French  habitually, 
and  many  of  us  thought  we  spoke  it.  But 
a  mocking  spirit  suggested  to  one  of  the 
guests  at  this  luncheon-party — an  energetic 
historical  tutor — the  wish  to  enlighten  M. 
Renan  as  to  how  the  University  was  gov- 
erned, the  intricacies  of  Convocation  and 
Congregation,  the  Hebdomadal  Council,  and 
all  the  rest.  The  other  persons  present  fell 
at  first  breathlessly  silent,  watching  the  gal- 
lant but  quite  hopeless  adventure.  Then, 

230 


THE    BEGINNINGS   OF   ROBERT   ELSMERE 

in  sheer  sympathy  with  a  good  man  in 
trouble,  one  after  another  we  rushed  in  to 
help,  till  the  constitution  of  the  University 
must  have  seemed  indeed  a  thing  of  Bedlam 
to  our  smiling  but  much-puzzled  guest;  and 
all  our  cheeks  were  red.  But  M.  Renan  cut 
the  knot.  Since  he  could  not  understand, 
and  we  could  not  explain,  what  the  constitu- 
tion of  Oxford  University  was,  he  suavely 
took  up  his  parable  as  to  what  it  should  be. 
He  drew  the  ideal  University,  as  it  were,  in 
the  clouds;  clothing  his  notion,  as  he  went 
on,  in  so  much  fun  and  so  much  charm,  that 
his  English  hosts  more  than  forgot  their  own 
defeat  in  his  success.  The  little  scene  has 
always  remained  with  me  as  a  crowning  in- 
stance of  the  French  genius  for  conversation. 
Throw  what  obstacles  in  the  way  you  please ; 
it  will  surmount  them  all. 

To  judge,  however,  from  M.  Kenan's 
letter  to  his  friend,  M.  Berthelot,  written 
from  Oxford  on  this  occasion,  he  was  not 
so  much  pleased  as  we  thought  he  was,  or 
as  we  were  with  him.  He  says,  "Oxford  is 
the  strangest  relic  of  the  past,  the  type  of 
living  death.  Each  of  its  colleges  is  a  terres- 
trial paradise,  but  a  deserted  Paradise."  (I 
see  from  the  date  that  the  visit  took  place 
in  the  Easter  vacation!)  And  he  describes 
the  education  given  as  "purely  humanist 

231 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

and  clerical,"  administered  to  "a  gilded 
youth  that  comes  to  chapel  in  surplices. 
There  is  an  almost  total  absence  of  the 
scientific  spirit."  And  the  letter  further 
contains  a  mild  gibe  at  All  Souls,  for  its 
absentee  Fellows.  "The  lawns  are  admi- 
rable, and  the  Fellows  eat  up  the  college 
revenues,  hunting  and  shooting  up  and  down 
England.  Only  one  of  them  works — my  kind 
host,  Max  Miiller." 

At  that  moment  the  list  of  the  Fellows  of 
All  Souls  contained  the  names  of  men  who 
have  since  rendered  high  service  to  England; 
and  M.  Renan  was  probably  not  aware  that 
the  drastic  reforms  introduced  by  the  two 
great  University  Commissions  of  1854  and 
1877  had  made  the  sarcastic  picture  he  drew 
for  his  friend  not  a  little  absurd.  No 
doubt  a  French  intellectual  will  always  feel 
that  the  mind-life  of  England  is  running  at 
a  slower  pace  than  that  of  his  own  country. 
But  if  Renan  had  worked  for  a  year  in  Ox- 
ford, the  old  priestly  training  in  him,  based  so 
solidly  on  the  moral  discipline  of  St.  Nicholas 
and  St.  Sulpice,  would  have  become  aware 
of  much  else.  I  like  to  think  that  he  would 
have  echoed  the  verdict  on  the  Oxford  under- 
graduate of  a  young  and  brilliant  French- 
man who  spent  much  time  at  Oxford  fifteen 
years  later.  "  There  is  no  intellectual  elite 

232 


THE    BEGINNINGS   OF    ROBERT   ELSMERE 

here  so  strong  as  ours  (i.  e.,  among  French 
students),"  says  M.  Jacques  Bardouz,  "but 
they  undoubtedly  have  a  political  elite,  and, 
a  much  rarer  thing,  a  moral  elite.  .  .  . 
What  an  environment ! — and  how  full  is  this 
education  of  moral  stimulus  and  force!" 

Has  not  every  word  of  this  been  justified  to 
the  letter  by  the  experience  of  the  war? 

After  the  present  cataclysm,  we  know 
very  well  that  we  shall  have  to  improve  and 
extend  our  higher  education.  Only,  in  build- 
ing up  the  new,  let  us  not  lose  grip  upon  the 
irreplaceable  things  of  the  old! 

It  was  not  long  after  M.  Kenan's  visit  that, 
just  as  we  were  starting  for  a  walk  on  a  May 
afternoon,  the  second  post  brought  my  hus- 
band a  letter  which  changed  our  lives.  It 
contained  a  suggestion  that  my  husband 
should  take  work  on  the  Times  as  a  member 
of  the  editorial  staff.  We  read  it  in  amaze- 
ment, and  walked  on  to  Port  Meadow.  It 
was  a  fine  day.  The  river  was  alive  with 
boats;  in  the  distance  rose  the  towers  and 
domes  of  the  beautiful  city;  and  the  Oxford 
magic  blew  about  us  in  the  summer  wind. 
It  seemed  impossible  to  leave  the  dear  Oxford 
life!  All  the  drawbacks  and  difficulties  of 
the  new  proposal  presented  themselves; 
hardly  any  of  the  advantages.  As  for  me, 

233 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

I  was  convinced  we  must  and  should  refuse, 
and  I  went  to  sleep  in  that  conviction. 

But  the  mind  travels  far — and  mysteri- 
ously— in  sleep.  With  the  first  words  that 
my  husband  and  I  exchanged  in  the  morning, 
we  knew  that  the  die  was  cast  and  that  our 
Oxford  days  were  over. 

The  rest  of  the  year  was  spent  in  prepara- 
tion for  the  change;  and  in  the  Christmas 
vacation  of  1880-81  my  husband  wrote  his 
first ' i  leaders ' '  for  the  paper .  But  before  that 
we  went  for  a  week  to  Dublin  to  stay  with 
the  Forsters,  at  the  Chief  Secretary's  Lodge. 

A  visit  I  shall  never  forget!  It  was  the 
first  of  the  two  terrible  winters  my  uncle 
spent  in  Dublin  as  Chief  Secretary,  and  the 
struggle  with  the  Land  League  was  at  its 
height.  Boycotting,  murder,  and  outrage 
filled  the  news  of  every  day.  Owing  to  the 
refusal  of  the  Liberal  Government  to  renew 
the  Peace  Preservation  Act  when  they  took 
office  in  1880 — a  disastrous  but  perhaps  in- 
telligible mistake — the  Chief  Secretary,  when 
we  reached  Dublin,  was  facing  an  agrarian 
and  political  revolt  of  the  most  determined 
character,  with  nothing  but  the  ordinary 
law,  resting  on  juries  and  evidence,  as  his  in- 
strument— an  instrument  which  the  Irish 
Land  League  had  taken  good  care  to  shatter 

in  his  hands.     Threatening  letters  were  flow- 

234 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT    ELSMERE 

ing  in  upon  both  himself  and  my  godmother; 
and  the  tragedy  of  1882,  with  the  revelations 
as  to  the  various  murder  plots  of  the  time, 
to  which  it  led,  were  soon  to  show  how  ter- 
rible was  the  state  of  the  country  and  how 
real  the  danger  in  which  he  personally  stood. 
But,  none  the  less,  social  life  had  to  be  car- 
ried on;  entertainments  had  to  be  given;  and 
we  went  over,  if  I  remember  right,  for  the 
two  Christmas  balls  to  be  given  by  the  Chief 
Secretary  and  the  Viceroy.  On  myself, 
fresh  from  the  quiet  Oxford  life,  the  Irish 
spectacle,  seen  from  such  a  point  of  view, 
produced  an  overwhelming  impression.  And 
the  dancing,  the  visits  and  dinner-parties, 
the  keeping  up  of  a  brave  social  show — quite 
necessary  and  right  under  the  circumstances! 
—began  to  seem  to  me,  after  only  twenty- 
four  hours,  like  some  pageant  seen  under  a 
thunder-cloud. 

Mr.  Forster  had  then  little  more  than  five 
years  to  live.  He  was  on  the  threshold  of 
the  second  year  of  his  Chief -Secretary  ship. 
During  the  first  year  he  had  faced  the  dif- 
ficulties of  the  position  in  Ireland,  and  the 
perpetual  attacks  of  the  Irish  Members  in 
Parliament,  with  a  physical  nerve  and  power 
still  intact.  I  can  recall  my  hot  sympathy 
with  him  during  1880,  while  with  one  hand 
he  was  fighting  the  Land  League  and  with 

235 


A    WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

the  other — a  fact  never  sufficiently  recog- 
nized— giving  all  the  help  he  could  to  the 
preparation  of  Mr.  Gladstone's  second  Land 
Act.  The  position  then  was  hard,  some- 
times heartbreaking;  but  it  was  not  beyond 
his  strength.  The  second  year  wore  him  out. 
The  unlucky  Protection  Act — an  experiment 
for  which  the  Liberal  Cabinet  and  even  its 
Radical  Members,  Mr.  Bright  and  Mr. 
Chamberlain,  were  every  whit  as  chargeable 
as  himself — imposed  a  personal  responsi- 
bility on  him  for  every  case  out  of  the  many 
hundreds  of  prisoners  made  under  the  Act, 
which  was  in  itself  intolerable.  And  while 
he  tried  in  front  to  dam  back  the  flood  of 
Irish  outrage,  English  Radicalism  at  his  heels 
was  making  the  task  impossible.  What  he 
was  doing  satisfied  nobody,  least  of  all  him- 
self. The  official  and  land-owning  classes  in 
Ireland,  the  Tories  in  England,  raged  be- 
cause, in  spite  of  the  Act,  outrage  continued; 
the  Radical  party  in  the  country,  which  had 
always  disliked  the  Protection  Act,  and  the 
Radical  press,  were  on  the  lookout  for  every 
sign  of  failure;  while  the  daily  struggle  in 
the  House  with  the  Irish  Members  while 
Parliament  was  sitting,  in  addition  to  all  the 
rest,  exhausted  a  man  on  whose  decision 
important  executive  acts,  dealing  really  with 
a  state  of  revolution,  were  always  depending. 

236 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF   ROBERT   ELSMERE 

All  through  the  second  year,  as  it  seemed  to 
me,  he  was  overwhelmed  by  a  growing  sense 
of  a  monstrous  and  insoluble  problem,  to 
which  no  one,  through  nearly  another  forty 
years — not  Mr.  Gladstone  with  his  Home 
Rule  Acts,  as  we  were  soon  to  see,  nor  Mr. 
Balfour's  wonderful  brain-power  sustained 
by  a  unique  temperament — was  to  find  the 
true  key.  It  is  not  found  yet.  Twenty 
years  of  Tory  Government  practically  solved 
the  Land  Question  and  agricultural  Ireland 
has  begun  to  be  rich.  But  the  past  year 
has  seen  an  Irish  rebellion;  a  Home  Rule 
Act  has  at  last,  after  thirty  years,  been 
passed,  and  is  dead  before  its  birth;  while 
at  the  present  moment  an  Irish  Convention 
is  sitting.1  Thirty-six  years  have  gone  since 
my  husband  and  I  walked  with  William 
Forster  through  the  Phoenix  Park,  over  the 
spot  where,  a  year  later,  Lord  Frederick 
Cavendish  and  Mr.  Burke  were  murdered. 
And  still  the  JEschylean  " curse"  goes  on, 
from  life  to  life,  from  Government  to  Gov- 
ernment. When  will  the  Furies  of  the  past 
become  the  "kind  goddesses"  of  the  future— 
and  the  Irish  and  English  peoples  build  them 
a  shrine  of  reconciliation? 

1  These  words  were  written  in  the  winter  of  1917.  At  the  pres- 
ent moment  (June,  1918)  we  have  just  seen  the  deportation 
of  the  Sinn  Feiners,  and  are  still  expecting  yet  another  Home 
Rule  BUI! 

237 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

With  such  thoughts  one  looks  back  over 
the  past.  Amid  its  darkness,  I  shall  always 
see  the  pathetic  figure  of  William  Forster, 
the  man  of  Quaker  training,  at  grips  with 
murder  and  anarchy;  the  man  of  sensitive, 
affectionate  spirit,  weighed  down  under  the 
weight  of  rival  appeals,  now  from  the  side 
of  democracy,  now  from  the  side  of  authority; 
bitterly  conscious,  as  an  English  Radical,  of 
his  breach  with  Radicalism;  still  more 
keenly  sensitive,  as  a  man  responsible  for 
the  executive  government  of  a  country,  in 
which  the  foundations  had  given  way,  to 
that  atmosphere  of  cruelty  and  wrong  in 
which  the  Land  League  moved,  and  to  the 
hideous  instances  poured  every  day  into  his 
ears. 

He  bore  it  for  more  than  a  year  after  we 
saw  him  in  Ireland  at  his  thankless  work. 
It  was  our  first  year  in  London,  and  we  were 
near  enough  to  watch  closely  the  progress  of 
his  fight.  But  it  was  a  fight  not  to  be  won. 
The  spring  of  1882  saw  his  resignation — on 
May  2d — followed  on  May  6th  by  the 
Phoenix  Park  murders  and  the  long  and 
gradual  disintegration  of  the  powerful  Min- 
istry of  1880,  culminating  in  the  Home  Rule 
disaster  of  1886.  Mr.  Churchill  in  the  Life 
of  his  father,  Lord  Randolph,  says  of  Mr. 
Forster's  resignation,  "he  passed  out  of  the 

238 


THE    BEGINNINGS   OF    ROBERT   ELSMERE 

Ministry  to  become  during  the  rest  of  Parlia- 
ment one  of  its  most  dangerous  and  vigilant 
opponents."  The  physical  change,  indeed, 
caused  by  the  Irish  struggle,  which  was  for  a 
time  painfully  evident  to  the  House  of 
Commons,  seemed  to  pass  away  with  rest  and 
travel.  The  famous  attack  he  made  on 
Parnell  in  the  spring  of  1883,  as  the  respon- 
sible promoter  of  outrage  in  Ireland,  showed 
certainly  no  lack  of  power — rather  an  in- 
crease. I  happened  to  be  in  the  House  the 
following  day,  to  hear  Parnell's  reply.  I 
remember  my  uncle's  taking  me  down  with 
him  to  the  House,  and  begging  a  seat  for 
me  in  Mrs.  Brand's  gallery.  The  figure  of 
Parnell;  the  speech,  nonchalant,  terse,  de- 
fiant, without  a  single  grace  of  any  kind,  his 
hands  in  the  pockets  of  his  coat;  and  the 
tense  silence  of  the  crowded  House,  remain 
vividly  with  me.  Afterward  my  uncle  came 
up-stairs  for  me,  and  we  descended  toward 
Palace  Yard  through  various  side-passages. 
Suddenly  a  door  communicating  with  the 
House  itself  opened  in  front  of  us,  and 
Parnell  came  out.  My  uncle  pressed  my 
arm  and  we  held  back,  while  Parnell  passed 
by,  somberly  absorbed,  without  betraying 
by  the  smallest  movement  or  gesture  any 
recognition  of  my  uncle's  identity. 

In  other  matters — Gordon,  Imperial  Fed- 

239 


A   WRITER'S   RECOLLECTIONS 

eration,  the  Chairmanship  of  the  Manchester 
Ship  Canal,  and  the  rest — William  Forster 
showed,  up  till  1885,  what  his  friends  fondly 
hoped  was  the  promise  of  renewed  and  suc- 
cessful work.  But  in  reality  he  never  re- 
covered Ireland.  The  mark  of  those  two 
years  had  gone  too  deep.  He  died  in  April, 
1886,  just  before  the  introduction  of  the 
Home  Rule  Bill,  and  I  have  always  on  the 
retina  of  the  inward  eye  the  impression  of 
a  moment  at  the  western  door  of  Westmin- 
ster Abbey,  after  the  funeral  service.  The 
flower-heaped  coffin  had  gone  through.  My 
aunt  and  her  adopted  children  followed  it. 
After  them  came  Mr.  Gladstone,  with  other 
members  of  the  Cabinet.  At  the  threshold 
Mr.  Gladstone  moved  forward,  and  took 
my  aunt's  hand,  bending  over  it  bareheaded. 
Then  she  went  with  the  dead,  and  he  turned 
away  toward  the  House  of  Commons.  To 
those  of  us  who  remembered  what  the  rela- 
tions of  the  dead  and  the  living  had  once 
been,  and  how  they  had  parted,  there  was  a 
peculiar  pathos  in  the  little  scene. 

A  few  days  later  Mr.  Gladstone  brought 
in  the  Home  Rule  Bill,  and  the  two  stormy 
months  followed  which  ended  in  the  Liberal 
Unionist  split  and  the  defeat  of  the  Bill  on 
June  7th  by  thirty  votes,  and  were  the 
prelude  to  the  twenty  years  of  Tory  Govern- 

240 


THE    BEGINNINGS    OF    ROBERT   ELSMERE 

ment.  If  William  Forster  had  lived,  there 
is  no  doubt  that  he  must  have  played  a  lead- 
ing part  in  the  struggles  of  that  and  sub- 
sequent sessions.  In  1888  Mr.  Balfour  said 
to  my  husband,  after  some  generous  words 
on  the  part  played  by  Forster  in  those  two 
terrible  years :  "  Forster's  loss  was  irreparable 
to  us  [i.  e.,  to  the  Unionist  party].  If  he  and 
Fawcett  had  lived,  Gladstone  could  not  have 
made  head." 

It  has  been,  I  think,  widely  recognized  by 
men  of  all  parties  in  recent  years  that  per- 
sonally William  Forster  bore  the  worst  of  the 
Irish  day,  whatever  men  may  think  of  his 
policy.  But,  after  all,  it  is  not  for  this, 
primarily,  that  England  remembers  him. 
His  monument  is  everywhere — in  the  schools 
that  have  covered  the  land  since  1870,  when 
his  great  Act  was  passed.  And  if  I  have 
caught  a  little  picture  from  the  moment  when 
death  forestalled  that  imminent  parting 
between  himself  and  the  great  leader  he  had 
so  long  admired  and  followed,  which  life 
could  only  have  broadened,  let  me  match  it 
by  an  earlier  and  happier  one,  borrowed 
from  a  letter  of  my  own,  written  to  my 
father  when  I  was  eighteen,  and  describing 
the  bringing  in  of  the  Education  Act. 

He    sat    down    amidst    loud    cheering.  .  .  . 

241 


A    WRITER'S    RECOLLECTIONS 

Gladstone  pulled  him  down  with  a  sort  of  hug  of 
delight.  It  is  certain  that  he  is  very  much 
pleased  with  the  Bill,  and,  what  is  of  great  conse- 
quence, that  he  thinks  the  Government  has 
throughout  been  treated  with  great  consideration 
in  it.  After  the  debate  he  said  to  Uncle  F., 
"  Well,  I  think  our  pair  of  ponies  will  run  through 
together!" 

Gladstone's  "  pony  "'was,  of  course,  the  Land 
Act  of  1870. 


THE   END    OF   VOL.    I 


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